blog.plee.me About software, technology and random things

13Jan/100

PDFCreator and mybrowserbar.com (Adware!)

Hi!

If you have recently encountered a weird behavior within your browser (I only know of Firefox because that's what I use), chances are that Adware has been installed onto your computer.

When I was looking for a picture on my own website and I mistyped the URL, I noticed that immediately after it showed me my custom 404 page, I was redirected to a domain called mybrowserbar.com. The URL was:

http://www.mybrowserbar.com/cgi/errors.cgi?q=[404URL]&type=404&ISN=[funkystring32]&ccv=130&cnid=302398&cco=US&ct=12

with [404URL] as the wrong URL. [funkystring32] seemed to be some kind of MD5 string (32 characters, 0-9, A-F), maybe a unique identifier.

After searching the internet for a couple of minutes, I read a thread on the official Avira forums. In it it was explained that PDFCreator comes with an Adware called "Search Settings Plugin" that installs and enables itself in Firefox. Luckily, being a normal addon, the problem was quickly solved from there: Tools => AddOns => Extensions => Search Settings Plugin => Uninstall/Disable.

I can only shake my head at things like this.

There has also been discussion on the official pdfforge (PDFCreator) forums about this:

http://en.pdfforge.org/forum/open-discussion/3140-search-settings-plugin-installed-wo-users-knowledge-along-yahoo-search

http://www.pdfforge.org/files/old_forum/2903.html

Thanks to the people at the official Avira forums! Oh, and nevertheless, in all honesty: thanks to pdfforge for providing such a nice tool. I have the feeling it's gonna be of great help to me in the future 🙂

Source: http://forum.avira.com/wbb/index.php?page=Thread&postID=895237

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  1. thx for your share ,I ‘ll give it a try. As far as I know , MS and Adobe are most frequently used tool to create PDF files.But Adobe Standard V9 is expensive.though a lot of third-party programs have the function as well.but my way to create .DOC is using pdf creating dll in .NET .this provide standerd API for PDF creator to generate PDF files.

    pdf creating dll in .NET http://www.rasteredge.com/how-to/csharp-imaging/pdf-creating/
    pdf viewer creator lib http://www.rasteredge.com/how-to/csharp-imaging/pdf-windows-viewer-create/


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