Shoppingcove.com

Shoppingcove.com Image

Shoppingcove.com claims to be a shopping website, a search engine that allows computer users to compare prices and read reviews for different products. While this service could be quite useful and there are various websites that offer similar services successfully, Shoppingcove.com's association with browser hijackers, make Shoppingcove.com's search results unreliable at best. This is because Shoppingcove.com will always elect to display advertisements for various shady online businesses among its supposed search results.

However, the main problem with Shoppingcove.com is not its unreliable search engine; it is the fact that cybercriminals use malware in order to promote Shoppingcove.com. In fact, most computer users that have visited or used Shoppingcove.com do so because their machine is infected with a browser hijacker, often including a rootkit component that can be extremely difficult to remove.

How Criminals Use Malware to Promote Websites

Fake or misleading search engines like Shoppingcove.com are very common. Criminals use these kinds of websites in order to prey on inexperienced computer users and generate an easy income from advertising revenue and various pay-per-click marketing schemes. Since computer users are not likely to choose Shoppingcove.com on their own – especially with the many free, reliable alternatives that exist in the search engine niche – criminals use a browser hijacker in order to boost their online traffic.

What a browser hijacker does is to take over the victim's web browser, using several means depending on the kind of browser hijacker, and then force it to visit a particular website against the computer user's authorization. Shoppingcove.com is linked to infections that affect the Hosts file, effectively changing fundamentally how the infected machine connects to the Internet. These kinds of browser hijackers (with a rootkit component) are among the most malicious, and ESG malware analysts recommend immediate action with a strong, reliable anti-malware tool with an anti-rootkit component.