A lot has been written about the viruses of the Hijackers group, which are browser hijackers. Almost all of them are identical in terms of impact on the operating system and the installed Internet browsers (browsers). As a rule, neutralizing such threats and completely eliminating them is not difficult. But among all this diversity there are real unique ones. One of those is the Yamdex.net virus. In most cases, it cannot be deleted using standard methods, because, unlike its counterparts, it does not appear in the list of installed programs. So, if such an urgent problem arose, it would be necessary to use completely non-standard solutions for disposal.
What is Yamdex.net?
So, in order. Before you begin to solve the problem of how to remove Yamdex from the system and get rid of the consequences of its impact, you must clearly understand what the user is dealing with.
What is it? Many users do not pay attention to the change in the search system and the start page just because the name of the virus itself is in tune with the popular Yandex service. When you start the browser, they see a practically similar interface and are surprised at the new design. We must pay tribute to the creators of this virus, because in this respect they are real cunning.
The virus exposure is not only a substitution of the search system and the start page. The issue is much deeper. Firstly, it constantly redirects to questionable sites that are distributors of other virus software. Secondly, the virus penetrates the system so deeply that it modifies the configuration, setting bans even in group policies, so that even a user with administrator rights and the highest privileges to change system settings cannot detect and neutralize it. Thus, you can remove Yamdex.net only with additional intervention in the policy settings, not to mention the deactivation of the virus directly in web browsers.
Using specialized programs
However, manual deletion is far from always the best and easiest way to neutralize threats. Therefore, for starters, you can try to remove Yamdex.net, using special anti-advertising programs for this.
For the average user, the best option would be a small but powerful AdwCleaner program, which can be found even in the portable version, which seems to be the preferred solution. Because when installing a stationary application, the virus can have an effect on it. How to remove Yamdex using this program? Easy peasy. It is enough to start a scan and get rid of all dangerous objects that will be found, and then perform a complete reboot.
How to remove http://yamdex.net from browsers
If we talk about the manual neutralization of the virus, the first thing to do is get rid of it in all browsers installed in the system, since it is embedded in any application of this type.
You can remove Yamdex from the browser in the standard way, which is to first change the search engine in the default settings to another and remove the virus search engine. If this is not possible, you should use the factory reset to the default settings in the browser itself or use the Avast Browser Cleanup program.
Then, through RMB on the browser icon, you must enter the properties of the browser shortcut and remove all the registry entries that are in the description of the object that the shortcut refers to (after the name of the browser or its launcher with the extension, there should be nothing). In addition, in the same properties on the general tab, you must set the Read-Only attribute and save the changes. If you don’t feel like doing such actions manually, you can download the small FixerBro utility, which will delete all posts and automatically in all browsers.
Registry Actions
Now, in the problem of how to remove Yamdex, you should pay attention to some registry keys. First, the editor itself is called (regedit). After that, a search (Ctrl + F) is used with the virus name (Yamdex) entered in the field. You can switch from one result to another by pressing the F3 key. All found records are subject to deletion.
Now you need to remove Yamdex from the entries matching the search engine of the browsers themselves. For example, for the Chrome browser in the HKLM branch through the SOFTWARE section, you need to find the destination browser folder and change the value of the DefaultSearchProviderEnabled key to zero.
After that you need to find the entry DefaultSearchProviderSearchUrl. The value field of this parameter should be empty (usually the start page is written in it).
How to remove Yamdex from security policies
Finally, the most basic. As already mentioned, the action of the virus occurs at the level of setting prohibitions in policies. They need to be removed. It’s not possible to delete the settings just like that, so you should use the cleaning of system directories and updating the settings of group policies.
First, in the Run console, write the line "% WinDir% \ System32 \ GroupPolicyUsers" (required with quotation marks). The corresponding directory opens, in which you just need to delete everything that is.
The next step in the matter of how to uninstall Yamdex will be to enter the line "% WinDir% \ System32 \ GroupPolicy" in the same "Run" menu. In the opened folder, as in the previous case, you need to get rid of all the contents.
Finally, to force a policy update in the Run console, a combination of gpupdate / force is entered, after which you just need to wait until the process is complete and restart the computer.
In order not to deal with manual removal, you can use the command line, in which all three commands are registered, but the RD / S / Q attributes are added before the first two.
Conclusion
And only now the problem of how to remove Yamdex can be considered solved completely. In conclusion, it is worth noting that if actions with browsers fail, the cleaning of system directories and the restart of group policies must be performed before that.