Search.hfreeliveradio.co

Posted by Sarah Stewart on August 22, 2017

What is Search.hfreeliveradio.co?

Search.hfreeliveradio.co is a questionable featured search website that may appear in your browsers without your knowledge. It is quite possible that you do not remember letting this malware infection on board; although, tens of thousands of users seem to have installed it knowingly. Since this infection can change some of your browser settings, we have classified it as a browser hijacker. You should not trust any of the content provided by this browser hijacker because it is capable of showing you potentially harmful third-party advertisements and links. Keeping this infection in your browsers could cause possible virtual security threats, not to mention the other malware programs that may have traveled with it. Our malware specialists at anti-spyware-101.com say that you should remove Search.hfreeliveradio.co from your PC if you want to use a clean computer; however, it could take more than just eliminating this one threat. test test test

Where does Search.hfreeliveradio.co come from?

This browser hijacker comes from a growing family created by Polarity Technologies Ltd. This family includes basically identical featured search pages, such as Search.hwatchtvnow.co and Search.searchwos.com. This infection is available as a browser extension that you can download officially off of “freeliveradio.co/Radio?”, its website, and “chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/free-live-radio/pacogkibldhicojmklpbapiilaleilbp”, the Chrome web store. It can be quite misleading though that an application has official pages and may make you believe that it is indeed reliable and legitimate. Please bear in mind that cyber criminals can set up such pages in no time to lure more victims into downloading their questionable products.

Although we can say that this browser hijacker is well-spread even via the official channel, as the almost 60 thousand downloads would suggest, but these are definitely not the only channels through which this infection can be distributed on the web. We have found that it is possible to install this threat by clicking on questionable third-party pop-up advertisements, for example, which could be a software download or update offer. You should never take such ads for granted because most of the time these are simple traps for unsuspecting computer users to step right in. When you click to install the alleged software or update, you may install this browser hijacker instead or worse, a whole bundle of malware threats. You could be exposed to such ads when visiting suspicious websites or when your PC is infected with adware programs. We advise you to only download programs from reputable official pages, which you can check out by running a web search. In order to be sure that your PC is clean, we suggest that you scan your system with a reliable malware scanner after you delete Search.hfreeliveradio.co.

How does Search.hfreeliveradio.co work?

This search engine site has a pseudo-toolbar at the top of the page that hosts a number of easy-access links to online radio sites, such as "iheart.com/live", and more. It also has the characteristic search tool on the left, right next to it, the Local Weather and News links. Although most of these links could lead to reliable pages, there could be questionable third-party ads displayed, which are always risky to click on. Therefore, we advise you to stay away from these. The same relates to the thumbnail links you can see below the search field in the middle of the page. This row of thumbnails you can hide or show by clicking on the link in its top-right corner.

You also need to be cautious with this search engine because it can show you manipulated search results. As a matter of fact, it sends all your search keywords to its server (query.hfreeliveradio.co) and then, you are redirected to a Yahoo search results page. This can be quite deceiving because you may consider the results all trustworthy. Unfortunately, this is not the case when you are redirected from this browser hijacker. It is also possible that this infection collects information about your online activities and uses this to target you with customized content in the form of third-party advertisements and links. However, the affiliates of such a tool are never taken responsibility for; thus, the content you may be exposed to also could be questionable. This is why we advise you to remove Search.hfreeliveradio.co as soon as you can.

How do I delete Search.hfreeliveradio.co?

We recommend that first you use the uninstaller if you have found this hijacker in your Internet Explorer browser. This uninstaller that you can find in the list of installed programs in Control Panel only works for this browser, however, so it is important that you reset your Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox browsers so that you take care of all possible threats related to these browsers. If you want to put an end to this browser hijacker manually, you can use our guide below as a reference. However, if you are looking for proper protection for your PC, we recommend that you start employing a decent anti-malware program, such as SpyHunter.