Infospace.com
The website Infospace.com is a search engine that is linked to a well-known online scam. Other domains associated with Infospace.com include start.infospace.com and dsclick.infospace.com. Infospace.com sports an attractive, professional-looking interface with a gray color scheme and bright red highlights. It boasts to be a "one stop search" provider as well as including tabs for searching images, news, and video. Any search entered into Infospace.com's search box, in other words, will result in little more than a list of spam and advertisements for shady websites rather than any actual search results. This is part of a scam that allows criminals to profit from advertising revenue and various different marketing schemes. Criminals get paid by the number of people they can get to view or click on certain advertisements. Instead of using the legitimate method of providing useful or attractive content in order to attract web traffic, criminals instead use lies and malware in order to force these advertisements onto their victims.
How Criminals Force You to Visit Infospace.com Repeatedly
One may wonder, why would anyone want to visit Infospace.com if all Infospace.com does is display spam? The answer is simple: most people visiting Infospace.com have no choice in the matter. Criminals use a very well known malware infection called browser hijacker to force computer users to visit Infospace.com repeatedly. Like its name implies, a browser hijacker is designed to assume control of the victim's web browser and to obligate it to visit a particular website repeatedly. The usual culprit is the Google Redirect Virus, which is a Trojan infection that is concocted to take control of the victim's web browser and to alter the top search results on legitimate search engines like Google, Yahoo or Bing. The altered search results link to the Infospace.com website instead of taking the victim to the actual website related to that search result. Since the Google Redirect Virus will often be part of a severe rootkit infection, any redirects to the Infospace.com website should be taken very seriously. These will often indicate the presence of very dangerous malware on your computer system and require immediate action.