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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 the application installs itself as a browser helper object (BHO) in the internet explorer and adds a toolbar icon as shown below:  

It changes the default search page and directs all the searches made in address bar to the site linkz.com where it provides its own advertisement based search results.

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: APHelper.dll
MD5Hash: eacaf0f9d32ca0870f57deebdb8cf25e

Following registries are added upon executing the application:

• HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\APHelper.APConfig
• HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\APHelper.APConfig.1
• HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\APHelper.APInstaller
• HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\APHelper.APInstaller.1
• HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\APHelper.APToolBarHelper
• HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\APHelper.APToolBarHelper.1
• HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{54EC170F-6EB1-47C6-
  9C4D-B0BE20CE45E}
• HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{93829908-07C2-44A2-
  95DB-F78F201A9B48}
• HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{CCF99CD5-1BCF-4DB2-
  8197-E9864A99702B}
• HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Interface\{12DEBC84-B743-423A-
  825C-049AD85309DC}
• HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Interface\{9B33399E-89A6-4EA5-
  91A9-5DC72B7AF60A}
• HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Interface\{EE1BC3C2-D245-4E64-
  A6B6-06425A3A5997}
• HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\TypeLib\{A37D57BD-5A27-4F8C-
  AB59-E0F6A7A0E95A}
• HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\
  CurrentVersion\Explorer\Browser Helper Objects\{54EC170F-
  6EB1-47C6-9C4D-EB0BE20CE45E}
• HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\
  CurrentVersion\Uninstall\{93829908-07C2-44A2-95DB-
  F78F201A9B48}
• HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Linkz
  

Removal

Aliases

Aliases

• Adware/AdBlock: Panda Antivirus