Home Malware Programs Potentially Unwanted Programs (PUPs) PrivateSeeker

PrivateSeeker

Posted: October 31, 2017

Threat Metric

Ranking: 4,736
Threat Level: 8/10
Infected PCs: 49,128
First Seen: October 31, 2017
Last Seen: March 9, 2025
OS(es) Affected: Windows

PrivateSeeker is a browser add-on, which offers to assist users in protecting all of their searches, therefore making it impossible for online marketing companies to use their search queries to provide individual users with targeted advertisements regarding products and services they might be interested in. While some users might be interested in trying out this feature, we'd like to make them aware of how PrivateSeeker functions. To protect your searches, PrivateSeeker will introduce you to a new website, which you will need to use to keep your searches anonymous – Private-seeking.com. While this website appears to be safe, it does not function at all at the moment and using the search feature yields no results. Since the PrivateSeeker add-on is categorized as a Potentially Unwanted Program (PUP) and it promotes a dysfunctional search engine, the advice is not to consider the installation of this software.

Users who opt to install the PrivateSeeker may have both their new tab and default search engine changed to Private-seeking.com. To revert this change, users will need to remove the PrivateSeeker from their computers completely. Since the extension is not harmful, its removal can be carried out manually by using Chrome's extension manager. However, if you don't want to handle manual removal, then you also can take care of the removal task by running a credible anti-malware utility.

Technical Details

File System Modifications

Tutorials: If you wish to learn how to remove malware components manually, you can read the tutorials on how to find malware, kill unwanted processes, remove malicious DLLs and delete other harmful files. Always be sure to back up your PC before making any changes.

The following files were created in the system:



%ALLUSERSPROFILE%\pghvegc\qpwcurl.exe File name: qpwcurl.exe
Size: 154.11 KB (154112 bytes)
MD5: f420b112e8b50c0151bc4e1c2cc86b50
Detection count: 56
File type: Executable File
Mime Type: unknown/exe
Path: %ALLUSERSPROFILE%\pghvegc\qpwcurl.exe
Group: Malware file
Last Updated: June 26, 2020
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