Adfoc.us

Adfoc.us is a URL truncation website that offers financial compensation for traffic and referrals. This service is not necessarily harmful, but malware researchers also associated Adfoc.us with browser-hijacking campaigns that have attempted to generate this traffic artificially. If your browser loads Adfoc.us automatically, your PC may be compromised by threats or a Potentially Unwanted Program. The usual remedies of system scans by reliable security tools should be able to remove all related threats and put a stop to Adfoc.us redirects.

The Price Your Browser Pays for Other People's Profits

Adfoc.us offers a service for shortening long website addresses into more legible, shorter ones, while rewarding its users for providing the traffic that goes through these links. A close look at Adfoc.us's business practices saw malware researchers failing to find any strong indications of hoaxes or illicit activities involved with the Adfoc.us's company. Sadly, the same can't be a characteristic of its users, some of whom have taken to using browser hijackings as a way to inflate their traffic numbers.

The latest Adfoc.us browser hijackings were verified in November of 2014, although malware experts also saw trace evidence of similar campaigns going back to several years. Threatening or unwanted software that has yet to be analyzed subjects your Web-browsing settings to modifications that may cause Adfoc.us to load new tabs and pop-up windows whenever you load an unrelated website. Chrome is the browser most often affected, but other browsers, particularly for Windows, also may be at risk.

Since Adfoc.us may provide links to arbitrary sites determined by third parties, the content loaded through this site may range from harmless advertisements to hoaxes or corrupted scripts. Since these campaigns already show no signs of respecting computer users sovereign control over their Web browsers, the chances of content including threatening links would seem to be reasonably high.

Bringing Adfoc.us Back out of Focus

The consistent behavior between different incidents of Adfoc.us hijackings leads malware experts to suspect a single threat of being responsible for most of the late 2014-era attacks. Until experts can find more information, any PCs that show signs of loading Adfoc.us automatically should be scanned by appropriate anti-adware and anti-malware products. You also may need to reset your Web-browsing settings, which may be a variable process dependent on your OS and browser of choice.

Adfoc.us isn't an illegitimate site, but its URL-shortening services may be used for threatening purposes. As a general safe browsing guideline, malware researchers recommend that you avoid using any shortened links that come from untrusted or possibly compromised sources. When you're in doubt, browsing to a website by inputting its URL manually always is safer than trusting a disguised link that may redirect you to compromised Web pages.