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Characteristics

McAfee(R) AVERT™ recognizes that this program may have legitimate uses in contexts where an authorized administrator has knowingly installed this application. If you agreed to a license agreement for this, or another bundled application, you may have legal obligations with regard to removing this software, or using the host application without this software. Please contact the software vendor for further information.

See http://vil.nai.com/vil/DATReadme.asp for a list of Program detections added to the DATs.

See http://vil.nai.com/vil/pups/configuration.htm for information about how to enable, disable, and exclude detection of legitimately installed programs.

Summary

This is not a virus or Trojan. It is a direct adware marketing application. Upon execution, it opens the site search-explorer.net and adds its own toolbar, as shown below:

Any search in the search bar of the toolbar will lead to search-explorer.com. While browsing, it contacts its many servers such as tb.adpowerzone.com, as.casalemedia.com, etc and subsequently shows popups such as one shown below:

Privacy

No license agreement is displayed during installation, although one could be displayed by another installer if bundled with another application. No privacy policy related to the software could be found.

Installation

File name: explbar.dll
MD5Hash: 75e3f0fa4710a0a6d7a6359d09d4757b

Following registry keys are added upon executing the application:

• HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Search-Explorer
• HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{23DDAE8C-6A79-4d62-
  80AA-E95D89CB9811}
• HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\SearchExplorer.SearchExplorerObj
• HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\SearchExplorer.SearchExplorerObj.1
• HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\TypeLib\{7FC19C98-AC4C-4D06-
  96D9-49F082D19FD7}
• HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\
  CurrentVersion\Uninstall\Search-ExplorerIEToolbar
  

Removal

Aliases

Aliases

• Adware.Win32.Pugi.d: Kaspersky
• Adware/SearchExplorer: Panda