When Malware on Windows can cause a headache on OS X (and even possibly your tablets)

The idea of Cross Platform is a beautiful one. The idea of starting a movie on Netflix on one device and picking up on another, or being able to research something at the office, fire up your browser at home and continue to look at the same site through a feature that sync’s your browser over any device sounds great and can be very handy.

But, as with many other things in the modern cloud based connected world we live in, there is a underlying dark side to the force that every so often rises up and causes problems.

That very dark side hit me over the weekend when I launched up Google Chrome on my Windows based tablet, only to find that one of those nasty little silent drive by installs has performed a browser highjack.  

My search engine was changed from Google to some ad spewing site as well as my home pages being changed from a combo of Facebook, Google Plus and inertialzendesigns.com tabs to the website for this hijacking piece of malware.

Not a problem I figured, I’ll just log into the Mac and search up how to clean this little annoyance up, a practice I’ve been used to doing over the years as even with Anti-Virus and Firewall softwares, sometimes these little annoyances get through. But then it hit Me

My Mac got hit with the SAME CHANGES TO THE HOMEPAGE AND SEARCH ENGINE SETTINGS!!!

You see, Google’s Sync settings worked too well, without realizing it the checkboxes were set to sync the options for search engine and home page on all devices  along with allowing cross platform sync’ed tabs and history were checked. As such, the result were what they were.

So, just how do you, My fellow users of the Internet, make sure the same thing does not happen to you?

With these steps is how:

1. Open Google Chrome and type in chrome://settings into the search bar

2. click on Advanced sync settings

3. Change just what you want to allow Chrome to Sync, in the case of making sure that Malware remains isolated to only the infected device, the areas where is it wise to uncheck are your settings and extensions, consider your History as well if you are extra cautious.

Finally click ok and resume your activities knowing you are a little bit safer.

David for inertialzendesigns.com