Link hijacking viruses are incredibly frustrating. A link hijacking virus tries to trick you into clicking on malicious links. If you search Google on a computer with a link hijacking virus, then you may find that some of the links on your search results appear to be legitimate but are actually just malicious links in disguise.
A virus called YellowMoxie is the latest and most common type of link hijacking virus available today. YellowMoxie changes URL paths and sends you to sites that you really don’t want to visit. It’s also a very sneaky form of malware that has managed to infiltrate the computers of even the most experienced PC users – so don’t feel bad if you’ve caught it.
YellowMoxie infects Firefox and Internet Explorer. It does not appear to affect links in Chrome. If you’ve noticed that search engine links appear to take you to strange websites, then you definitely have a link hijacking virus and it could very well be YellowMoxie. If you’re ready to get rid of YellowMoxie (or any link hijacking virus), then follow the instructions below:

Step 1) The first and most important thing to know about removing YellowMoxie is that you absolutely do not have to pay to remove it – despite what search engine results on Google might tell you. This entire fix-up can be performed for free.
Step 2) Some link hijackers attempt to take over your browser’s default search engine area. To check if that’s the case, open Firefox and click the down arrow next to the search box (in the top right corner of your browser window). Click the Manage search engines button and delete any search engines you don’t recognize. Really, there’s no good reason to have anything but Bing and Google in your search engine box (who uses social media sites for searching anyway?). You can access the Manage search engines feature on Internet Explorer in the same way.

Step 3) Step 2 won’t work for everyone. If you only see legitimate search engines in that Manage search engines box, then you’ll need to take some extra steps. First, download the popular free utility called CCleaner and clear out all the cookies and temporary internet files from your PC. Next, download PC Cleaner Pro and perform the same scan. If any issues are discovered, fix them immediately. Once you’ve performed a scan with both CCleaner and PC Cleaner Pro, restart your computer. Open your browser to see if the problem persists.
Step 4) If that still hasn’t fixed your problem, it’s time to go nuclear. Uninstall your browser using the Windows Control Panel. You won’t be able to uninstall Internet Explorer, but you can roll back to an older version of IE by going to Start menu > Control Panel > View updates and then choosing to remove the most recent update to Internet Explorer. Since the malware is apparently living in the most recent update to IE, rolling back to an earlier version may remove the problem.
Steps 2, 3, and 4 will fix 99% of link hijacking viruses and malware problems on your PC. If you’re having trouble with a Google redirect virus and the above steps didn’t fix that problem, leave a comment down below and we’ll try to get to the bottom of your problem together.