How to remove Whitesmoke Toolbar?

What is Whitesmoke Toolbar?

Whitesmoke is generally known as a translation software solution for high quality translations. It is based on advanced statistical machine translation technology. However, recently Whitesmoke toolbar is being installed to random computer systems without users’ knowledge and later on it leads to very annoying redirections, mainly to search.whitesmoke.com and some other websites.Whitesmoke changes your homepage and default search engine to search.whitesmoke.com despite what websites have been set in your browser before. This is first of all very annoying, especially if you are used to have specific ones that you use most often and so on.

Whitesmoke toolbar is listed as a Potentially Unwanted Product because it hijacks users’ searches by default. It tends to change search results and tries to install some malicious software that can lead to stealing money from you. It causes various pop up ads and once you click on them it can download some questionable software on your machine. The toolbar is made by Conduit, therefore  the search function is redirected to their pages. They earn money for the advertisements displayed and additional software installed.

Malware creators often use the names of well known products to distribute their software. Whitesmoke toolbar is one of the examples. However, if you never downloaded Whitesmoke products, you shouldn’t have gotten their toolbars either. So if you found it on your computer out of nowhere and you constantly experience redirections and regularly receive various notification messages, you should definitely remove it.

How to uninstall Whitesmoke and stop the redirects

If you cannot find the uninstaller of Whitesmoke toolbar, we highly recommend changing your search page, search provider and then using a reliable anti-spyware program, such as Spyhunter or Spybot S&D. These programs can detect all questionable toolbars. Go to Control Panel -> Add and Remove programs list and uninstall it from there. Scan with ”Spyhunter” as it identifies such programs quite well. You should also check browser extensions for Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome. If you do not see WhiteSmoke Toolbar listed, you should use antimalware tools like Spyhunter and scan your computer with it. Uninstalling the program from your computer doesn’t change your search providers, it only stops ads appearing on your computer. You will have to do it manually by yourself. Depending on the browser you are using, follow the instructions below:

On Internet explorer:

1. Click arrow on the right of search box.
2. Do the following: on IE8-9 choose Manage Search Providers, on IE7 click Change Search Defaults.
3. Remove WhiteSmoke Toolbar from the list.

On Firefox :

1. Enter “about:config” in url bar. This will open settings page.
2. Type “Keyword.url” in the search box. Right click it & reset it.
3. Type “browser.search.defaultengine” in the search box. Right click it & reset it.
4. Type “browser.search.selectedengine” in the search box. Right click it & reset it.
5. Search for “browser.newtab.url”. Right-click and reset. This will make sure that the search page won’t launch on each new tab.

On Google Chrome:

1. Click 3 horizontal lines icon on browser toolbar.
2. Select Settings.
3. Select Basics ->Manage Search engines.
4. Remove unnecessary search engines from list.
5. Go back to Settings. On Startup choose Open blank page ( you can remove undesired pages from the set pages link too).

Whitesmoke Toolbar is a parasitic Browser Hijacker
Whitesmoke Toolbar may show numerous annoying advertisements
Whitesmoke Toolbar logs your internet browsing history
Whitesmoke Toolbar will replace (hijack) your browser homepage
Whitesmoke Toolbar may spread additional spyware
Whitesmoke Toolbar violates your privacy and compromises your security

Whitesmoke Toolbar screenshots

Whitesmoke Toolbar is classified as a Browser Hijacker, which means its parasitic damage payload consists of hijacking your browser homepage, error page, or search page with its own, mostly a commercial site of its creators, forcing you to accumulate force hits to a particular website to make it more popular or by using pay-per-click sites to earn money.

The easiest way for a Browser Hijacker such as Whitesmoke Toolbar to infect your computer is to exploit certain ActiveX controls and other security holes in your Internet Explorer browser. By browsing insecure websites on the internet, users may encounter various pop-ups, which secretly install Browser Hijackers like Whitesmoke Toolbar on your computer once clicked upon.

As soon as Whitesmoke Toolbar completes its operations, the overall browser stability and performance severely degrade, making it nearly impossible to surf the web normally.