Home Possibly Unwanted Program ProductManualsFinder Toolbar

ProductManualsFinder Toolbar

Posted: November 24, 2016

Threat Metric

Ranking: 4,786
Threat Level: 1/10
Infected PCs: 20,561
First Seen: November 24, 2016
Last Seen: October 16, 2023
OS(es) Affected: Windows


ProductManualsFinder is a Potentially Unwanted Program (PUP) developed and distributed by Mindspark Interactive Network and associated with the MyWay family of search engines. The link between the two companies is owed to the fact that the installation of the ProductManualsFinder may ask for the user's authorization to set the MyWay.com search engine as the default new tab page for major Web browsers such as Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox and Internet Edge.

Originally, ProductManualsFinder is meant to serve as a useful tool that helps users find and access over 5,000 manuals for all sorts of household electronics quickly. While this feature may sound useful, ProductManualsFinder doesn't do anything special to deliver these results – it simply extracts public information from 3rd-party services and websites.

Although ProductManualsFinder may prove to be useful sometimes, users should not neglect that the installation of this software may often lead to unwanted changes to their Web browser's settings. The positive side of the whole deal is that while ProductManualsFinder may tamper with your Web browser's settings, it will not apply any changes that will put your online privacy and safety in harm's way. In fact, the MyWay.com search engine that ProductManualsFinder promotes is legitimate, but the search page may be accompanied by ads and links to 3rd-party websites and promotional offers.

If you have the ProductManualsFinder extension running and you don't find it useful particularly, or you don't recall agreeing to install it, then the recommended course of action is to remove the Potentially Unwanted Program from your computer. Handing the removal of ProductManualsFinder is a task that can be done with the assistance of an anti-malware scanner either manually or automatically. Manual removal involves opening the list of installed Web browser extensions and uninstalling ProductManualsFinder from there, but if this doesn't work you should not hesitate to fire up a reputable anti-malware scanner since this should take care of the issue in a matter of minutes.

Technical Details

Registry Modifications

The following newly produced Registry Values are:

HKEY..\..\..\..{RegistryKeys}Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\DOMStorage\productmanualsfinder.dl.myway.comSoftware\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\DOMStorage\productmanualsfinder.dl.tb.ask.comSoftware\ProductManualsFinderHKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\[APPLICATION]\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall..{Uninstaller}ProductManualsFinderTooltab Uninstall Internet Explorer

Additional Information

The following directories were created:
%LOCALAPPDATA%\ProductManualsFinderTooltab
The following URL's were detected:
productmanualsfinder.com
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