Hi there. Thank you for taking the time to help me. My trouble all started when I tried to download a flash player. Now I have “Ads by Shop Smart” Pop-up that keeps appearing on my web browser (Mozilla Firefox) and never goes away. I have problem watching videos online. When I click to watch it a box always pops up saying I have to do a quick survey beforehand. I don’t want to give my personal details out to people so I exit out. Is there a virus in your computer? I have spent a few hours scanning my computer with AVG, it says my computer is clean. When I open Task Manager, I don’t see any suspicious process. What should I do?
Shop Smart is classified as adware that is prone to attack web browsers including Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome as soon as it is installed. At first sight, this application seems like good software which will help computer users to save both time and money when shopping online because it claims it provides various deals, coupons and commercial offers for users. However, most people who installed this application only found it annoying and useless. The adware can display crazy coupons and deals ads at every corner of the compromised web browser, in all kinds of forms such as pop-up, pop-under, in-text, banner or contextual advertisements without your permission. Therefore, if you see pop-ups labeled as “Ads by Shop Smart”, “Brought by Shop Smart” or “Powered by Shop Smart”, you should know that an adware is installed on your PC and making chaos, you need to take care of that immediately, or you’ll face some severe cyber security damages.
Shop Smart serves as a private ad platform for adware developers to earn pay-per-click revenue. It gets installed with other software – especially free programs and downloads such as TV shows, music or movies. Once it is downloaded, it can modify your browser settings and inject in-text ads, video ads, banners, pop-ups, and other forms of advertising to your browser that may certainly have a negative impact on your browsing experience. The adware bombards you with unwanted pop-ups and it may install potentially unwanted programs to your machine without your approval. Those PUPs consume a plenty of network resources, this is why it takes a long time to load your webpages after computer is compromised. In addition, Shop Smart can be used to track user’s web browsing habits, record addresses of visited sites and send collected data to a remote server. Users are recommended to get rid of it without any delay.
If you open your browser window (includes IE, Firefox, Safari and Google Chrome etc.) and notice immediately that your home page has been changed to a page you do not recognize, then your browser may have been hijacked by adware. For this type of adware, it can keep giving you Shop Smart pop-up ads. Other malicious activities can be shown on your computer after hijacked are listed below:
1. It can not only change your web pages, but also alter other settings to add toolbars, pop-up advertisements, and bookmarks that you did not create.
2. It can modify the homepage settings of your web browser, more commonly by reducing your internet security options. And the worse thing is it prevents you from changing them back.
3. New toolbars or Favorites are installed that give you icons and links to web pages that you don’t want.
4. It may block you from visiting certain website you’d like to visit and show an error page instead.
5. It will display constant pop-up ads, sometimes in such large amounts that you are not able to close neither the ads nor the browser.
“Ads by Shop Smart” pop up hijacks your browser to redirect your web search results and changes the homepage and browser settings. To completely uninstall it from an infected system, manual removal is the first choice because sometimes antivirus software cannot pick up the exact computer threat timely or remove it permanently. Now most browser hijackers are quite similar to spyware and adware threats and therefore cannot be removed with the help of popular antivirus products. Users can follow the manual guide here to get rid of this browser hijacker completely.
1. Clear all the cookies of your affected browsers.
Since this tricky hijacker virus has the ability to use cookies for tracing and tracking the internet activity of users, it is suggested users delete all the cookies before a complete removal.
Google Chrome:
Click on the “Tools” menu and click the “Clear browsing data” button.
Select “Delete cookies and other site data” to delete all cookies from the list.
Internet Explorer:
Open Internet explorer window
Click the “Tools” button
Point to “safety” and then click “delete browsing history”
Tick the “cookies” box, then click “delete”
Mozilla Firefox:
Click on Tools, then Options, select Privacy
Click “Remove individual cookies”
In the Cookies panel, click on “Show Cookies”
To remove a single cookie click on the entry in the list and click on the “Remove Cookie”
To remove all cookies click on the “Remove All Cookies” button
2. End the malicious process from Task Manager.
Once “Ads by Shop Smart” adware is installed, computer user may notice that CPU usage randomly jumps to 100 percent. At any time Windows always has many running processes. A process is an individual task that the computer runs. In general, the more processes, the more work the computer has to do and the slower it will run. If your system’s CPU spike is constant and remain at a constant 90-95%, users should check from Task Manager and see if there is a suspicious process occupying the system resources and then end it immediately.
(The name of the virus process can be random.)
Press Ctrl+Shift+Esc to quickly bring up Task Manager Window：
3. Show hidden files and folders.
Open Folder Options by clicking the Start button, clicking Control Panel, clicking Appearance and Personalization, and then clicking Folder Options.
Click the View tab.
Under Advanced settings, click Show hidden files and folders, uncheck Hide protected operating system files (Recommended) and then click OK.
4. Remove all the malicious files related to Shop Smart ads hijacker manually.
%AppData%Local[random].exe
C:Documents and SettingsLocalServiceLocal SettingsTemporary Internet Files*.exe
HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoftInternet ExplorerMain StartPage
HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionRun
Adverts titled with “Ads by Shop Smart” are usually annoying and they are caused by adware or potentially unwanted programs which can install on your PC without asking for any permission. The ads can appear anytime on your web browser and block you from surfing the web properly, especially when you are on e-commerce websites, such as eBay or Amazon. Don’t click on Shop Smart ads in any cases for this adware will not offer you anything good even though it claims it can help you purchase some particular goods at very appealing price rate. You should know that this is just a trick to win your attention and make you click on one of their advertisements. In this way, hackers can make use of the artificial traffic to earn money. The application can not only change your homepage and search engine, but also redirect your web browser to website you don’t want. It is considered to be a potential threat for computer security so you need to get rid of Shop Smart from computer as soon as possible.
Note: If you are not a computer expert and have no idea how to perform the removal, please contact experts from YooCare Online Tech Support for further help.
Published by on May 23, 2015 1:15 am, last updated on May 23, 2015 1:17 am
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.