Skilled Marketing MacOS Adware/Browser Hijacker
Skilled Marketing is a Potentially Unwanted Program (PUP) aiming to lead users to sponsored Web links, Web advertisements, and all sorts of unwanted browser redirects. It often lands uninvited onto one or all the web browsers installed on a machine. Once in, Skilled Marketing modifies its settings, persisting in refusing to stop nagging you to keep clicking on advertised URLs to someone else’s financial benefit. Such patterns of behavior usually come from browser hijackers and adware tools, which is why most security analysts tend to flag Skilled Marketing as such.
Secret Landing Followed by Secret Redirects
Like any other piece of adware or hijacker, Skilled Marketing can be a real pain in the neck for a couple of reasons. First, most PC and Mac users would have little to no idea how this tool made it to their web browser(s). Second, Skilled Marketing would reroute all Web searches to the affiliate sites they are required to advertise. While experienced Mac owners are very likely to spot such a PUP, novices may have trouble noticing it. Should even one page redirect turn out to be storing any malicious code, those novices could potentially get into real trouble. Third, Skilled Marketing is a tough nut to crack because it tends to endure any uninstallation attempts and has a way of spreading over every web browser present on the targeted Mac.
The Mac Variant
Hitting only MS Windows machines until recently, Skilled Marketing has now set eyes on MacOS users, aiming to redirect as many of them as possible to cash-generating sponsored Web places. The greater the number of successfully redirected Mac users, the higher the sponsors' rewards. That is why it is no wonder that the guys who created Skilled Marketing in the first place have also devised custom variants for all the popular browsers out there — Safari, Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, etc. Should you happen to have the tool on your Mac, the chances are that you'll be getting web redirects and ad prompts regardless of the browser you've opened. Moreover, since those redirects are automatic, they often are practically impossible to avoid unless you remove the thing altogether.
On the other hand, a complete removal is often challenging unless you deploy a reputable anti-malware program. We've seen hundreds of browser hijackers, add-ons, and extensions that would not go away no matter how hard we've tried to delete it manually — their core files always seem to find ways to persist nonetheless.
Skilled Marketing could potentially lead you to a compromised sponsored Web page, albeit posing minimal immediate risks to your macOS machine. We've often seen examples where a piece of adware similar to Skilled Marketing redirects us to a malware-laden URL.
In a nutshell, no guarantee that sponsored ads will always lead you to safe havens on the Web. Sometimes, you may find yourself on some pretty threatening turf despite all the good intentions of the guys behind Skilled Marketing or any other similar adware/hijacker tool.