Welcome to our how to remove Safebrowsing.biz instructions. This article intends to help you remove Safebrowsing.biz from your system and is designed to work for Chrome, Firefox and Internet Explorer and all Windows versions.

Safebrowsing.biz is a form of a browser hijacker and you are very right to be on this page, especially if you have found that your computer has been infected by it. Don’t be alarmed thinking this is a virus, though. You might have noticed that it’s been called that name across the web on different forums and other virus removal pages, however, this is certainly not the case. It’s an important distinction and it exists for a reason. Viruses or any form of malware are pieces of programming, which are specifically designed to cause harm. If you’ve heard of things like Trojan Horses or ransomware – that’s the direction you should be thinking in.

Safebrowsing.biz, on the other hand, as belonging to the class of browser hijackers, has no such intentions. As you can tell from the name, its sole purpose is to generate advertisements (browser hijacker= ads + software) and distribute them in your browser in the form of pop-ups, banners and page redirects. However, just because it’s not a virus, doesn’t mean it has the potential of becoming a hazard and we will explain what we mean by that shortly. Indeed, while this is neither a virus nor ransomware you should still have it removed from your machine – the sooner the better.

How Safebrowsing.biz functions

Like in the case with any browser hijacker, the developers aim to gather as many ‘hits’ on the featured advertisements as humanly possible. This is why there’s so many of them: it’s difficult to NOT click on any of these ads, when you can hardly see the webpage in the background from all the offers and banners and little box ads. It’s like a minefield. The clicks are necessary because that’s how the creators of Safebrowsing.biz make their money (check out more info on the Pay per click scheme, if you would like to have a better understanding of this principle). But, because they can’t only count on chance clicks or accidental ones (some of you out there are better at operating a mouse than others), they try to attract intentional clicks as well. And how do you do that? By showcasing something that’s genuinely interesting, of course. Only trouble in that is figuring out exactly what is interesting to the specific users. Not to worry, though, this is where one of the browser hijacker’s hidden qualities emerges and it’s in… kind of spying on you. Well, it depends on how you look at it, but that seems like a fair way of putting it.

So, programs like Safebrowsing.biz tend to gather all of your information that’s related to browsing. This includes things like your favorited and bookmarked pages, your search queries, history and more. All of this data is then analyzed in order to generate content that is more relevant to you in the hopes that it will ‘speak’ to you. Speaking of which, one sure way to know you’ve been infected by browser hijacker is if you notice a sudden correlation between what you’ve recently been looking up online and the ads you are currently seeing. However, back to your browsing details, the one that were used in creating ads. Once those have been used, they are very likely to be sold to third parties, which could possibly result in data misuse and theft. Not fun.

How it’s distributed

A key moment in understanding how to protect your computer from future infections with browser hijacker is knowing how it got into your system in the first place. A very common method used by developers (and please take not of this, because this same method can be used to distribute both viruses and legitimate software) is a thing called program bundles. The idea of it is to ‘bundle’ one program with another one, so that when you download one of them, the second comes packaged with it. This could be some freeware, a cracked program or anything, really, and you won’t know about the bundled in constituent until you’ve already downloaded the said program. What you can do, though, in order to prevent it from sprouting roots, is to opt for the custom or advanced setup, when you initiate the installation process. This is very important, because otherwise you will not see what else has been included in the desired program and you will be leaving yourself of the mercy of the developers. This way, on the other hand, you will not only see what else has been bundled in, but will also be able to choose whether you want it to be installed as well, or not.

Remove Safebrowsing.biz from Chrome/Firefox

Reveal Hidden Files. If you don’t know how to do this, ask us in the comments.

Press  => Control Panel => Uninstall a program.

Locate the browser hijacker and any other suspicious looking programs and uninstall them.

Additional 2.1:

Sort the programs by Installed On.

Delete recent suspicious entries.

Additional 2.2:

In the search field type => msconfig => hit Enter.

Go to Startup and disable all entries with Unknown as Manufacturer.

 => Search=> Copy/Paste “notepad %windir%/system32/Drivers/etc/hosts” => Enter.

If you notice other IPs different from the localhost IPs – you might be in danger!

Ask for additional help in the comments.

Remove Safebrowsing.biz from Chrome

Click => More Tools => Extensions.

Locate the browser hijacker and remove it.

Remove Safebrowsing.biz from Firefox

Click  => Add-ons=> Extensions.

Locate the browser hijacker and delete it.

Removal from Internet Explorer

Press on  => Manage Add-ons =>

Find the browser hijacker and remove it.

Right click on the Taskbar => Start Task Manager.

Navigate to Processes.

Locate any suspicious processes associated with Safebrowsing.biz. Right click on the process = > Open File Location => End Process = > Delete the directories with the suspicious files.

 => Search => Type:

• %AppData%
• %LocalAppData%
• %ProgramData%
• %WinDir%
• %Temp%

Hit Enter after each new search. Check each Folder and delete recent entries.

If you run into any trouble – ask us for help in the comments section!