How to uninstall Motitags Toolbar hijacker from your computer

What is “Motitags” toolbar ?

“Motitags” toolbar (www.motitags.com/) is a browser hijacker program that modifies your Internet homepage and search provider to “www.home.tb.ask.com/” in order to redirect browsing results to ads from unknown publishers. 

Why you should remove it?

The “Motitags” was most probably installed on your computer without your knowledge and it hijacks your browser settings in order to redirect your web searches to advertisements to earn money for its publishers. Programs like this are quite often bundled in the installation files of other legitimate programs (software tools and other stuff). People go through the installation (of the legitimate software) without noticing that they are also installing additional software (like toolbars) that is not necessary for the legitimate software to run.

You MUST remove “Motitags” hijacker A.S.A.P. Your computer is at a great risk! Never underestimate the power that browser hijackers can have on your life.

How to remove “Motitags” toolbar from your computer?

You can easily get rid of “Motitags” toolbar infection by following the steps given bellow:

Step 1: Uninstall Motitags toolbar from your Control Panel

• Open Windows Control Panel. In case you don’t know how to do that, here is what you have to do:
  • For Windows 8/7/Vista click at: Start > Control Panel >Programs and Features.
  • For Windows XP click at: Start > Settings > Control Panel > Add or Remove Programs.
• From the program list find and remove/uninstall the following applications:
• • Motitags toolbar
  • Uninstall any other unknown application.

Step 2. Remove Motitags.com toolbar settings by using AdwCleaner.

• Download “AdwCleaner”  utility to your computer (e.g. your desktop).
• After you download it, close all open programs and run AdwCleaner.
• At the main window, press the “Scan” button and wait until the scan is completed.
• Finally press the “Clean” button to remove all the entries it has found and restart your computer.

Step 3: Ensure that all “Motitags” settings and extensions are removed from your Internet browser.

Now that you have done that, you must clean your internet browsers from toolbars, plugins and extensions that are still in there, and also change the default search engine back to Google or to whatever you like to use. The instructions on how to do that are different for each browser. Here are detailed instructions for Internet Explorer, Firefox and Chrome.

Internet Explorer

• From Internet Explorer’s main menu, click: “Tools ” (the gear icon) and choose “Internet Options”.
• At “General” tab, delete the Ask homepage “home.tb.ask.com” from “Home page” box &  type your preferred homepage.
• Then at the “Search” section, (Tools > Manage Add-ons) press the “Settings” button.
• • On “Search Providers” options:
    • Choose and “Set as default” the search provider you want (e.g. Google).
    • Then select the “Ask Web Search” search provider and click “Remove“.
  • Finally go to “Toolbars and Extensions” options at the left pane.
    • Select any extension from “Mindspark Interactive Network“ that exists there and click “Disable“.
• Close all Internet Explorer windows and restart your browser.

Mozilla Firefox

• Press the Firefox menu button (from the top left) and choose “Options”.
• At “General” tab:
• • Delete the “home.tb.ask.com” from the “Home Page” box and type your preferred homepage.
• Close Firefox options and then go again to FF main menu & choose “Add-ons”.
• • Click “Extensions” on the left pane and remove the following extensions from here: Motitags
  • Then choose “Plugins” from the left pane and set all “MindSpark” plugins to “Never Activate”.
• Close Firefox Add-ons window.
• Close all Firefox windows and restart your browser.

Google Chrome

• Click on Chrome’s menu (the gear icon at the upper right corner) and choose “Settings“.
• Look on “Startup” section and  choose “Set Pages“.
  • Delete the unwanted home page “home.tb.ask.com” by pressing the “X” symbol on the right.
  • Then set your preferred startup page (for example http://www.google.com) and press “OK“.
• Now go to “Appearance” section, and click to enable the “Show Home button” checkbox.
• • Delete the unwanted webpage “home.tb.ask.com” from “Open this page” box.
  • Set your preferred webpage to open when you press the “Home page” button & press “OK”.
• Finally, choose “Extensions” on the left pane.
• • Remove the “Motitags”  extension from there by pressing the “recycle icon” to the right.
• Close Google Chrome

Step 4: Remove remaining malicious registry entries and files.

• Download and install “Malwarebytes Anti-Malware Free“. (Beware: at the last screen of installation, uncheck the box next to “Enable free Trial of Malwarebytes Anti-Malware PRO” in order to use the free version of this GREAT software).
• Run Malwarebytes Anti-Malware and at the “Scanner” tab, select the “Quick Scan” option and press the “Scan” button.
• Wait until this process is finished. Then click the “Show Results” button to review its findings.
• Right-click to “Select All” items found and press the “Remove Selected” button.
• Restart your computer if needed and you ‘re done.

One final step: Restart your computer and perform a full scan with your antivirus program.

That’s all folks! It might sound like a lot of work, but in reality you’ll be free from the “Motitags” toolbar infection in less than 20 minutes, if you follow these instructions. Did it work for you? Please leave a comment in the comment section below or even better: like and share this blog post in the social networks to help spread the word about these really annoying crap Windows infections.

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