News-cloud.net

Posted by Max Lehmann on January 18, 2017

What is News-cloud.net?

Looking at the URL you might be given the impression that News-cloud.net has something to with news. However, it is a malicious search engine that we have classified as a browser hijacker due to the way it is disseminated. It can replace your browser’s homepage address without your authorization which is a malicious action, so you might want to remove it because of that. Nevertheless, there are other problems with this so-called search engine, such as information collection and unreliable advertising. For more details, read this description. test

Where does News-cloud.net come from?

Our malware analysts have found that this particular browser hijacker was developed by a known browser hijacker developer based in Russia. The browser hijackers coming from this developer have recently changed their visual appearance, but the core functionality remains unmodified, and the same is true of its distribution methods. Our malware analysts say that this new hijacker is bundled with malicious software installers commonly found on not so legitimate freeware hosting sites based in Russia. The installers were configured to inject this hijacker into your browser secretly via a browser extension. Hence, they do not warn you or allow you to deselect this hijacker’s installation. Therefore, in the event, you install a software bundle that contains News-cloud.net, the only way to can prevent it from entering your PC is to have a reliable anti-malware program. Otherwise, it will enter your PC and subsequently your browser.

What does News-cloud.net do?

Once News-cloud.net has replaced your browser’s homepage, it will work like a regular search engine and provide you with satisfactory search results. However, it redirects search queries to a modified Google search engine to do that. The problem is that this hijacker can modify and customize the results to include additional promotional links of unknown origin. Therefore, we consider it unreliable because it can potentially promote malicious content.

To avoid confusion, we want to point out that News-cloud.net is not this hijacker’s main URL because this hijacker can redirect you to http://www.news-cloud.net/i/start.html, http://blankpage1.ru/i/start.html, http://chromepage8.ru/main.html, or http://blankpage6.ru/i/start.html. The number in the URL can go from 1 to 8, and you will be redirected to any one of these URLs each time you open your browser.

Like any other browser hijacker, this one was also configured to collect some information about you automatically. Researchers say that News-cloud.net should use web beacons and browser cookies to obtain anonymous information such as your browsing history, entered search queries, Internet Protocol (IP) address, Internet Service Provider (ISP) domain name, and so on. All of this information is used for advertising purposes, specifically to personalize the ad campaign of each unique user. Indeed, this hijacker’s primary objective is to generate advertising revenue, so it is no surprise that it is set to replace the homepage address by force and gather information about you.

How to remove News-cloud.net

Our malware analysts say that News-cloud.net should come with a browser extension, so you might have to delete it to get rid of this hijacker entirely. If you run into trouble such as this hijacker refusing to go away, then it might have also hijacked with Target line in which case you will have to fix it to get rid of this hijacker for good. We have included a removal guide below for your convenience.