Home Possibly Unwanted Program PUP.General Crawler

PUP.General Crawler

Posted: February 27, 2014

Threat Metric

Ranking: 7,574
Threat Level: 1/10
Infected PCs: 6,525
First Seen: February 27, 2014
Last Seen: October 11, 2023
OS(es) Affected: Windows


General Crawler is a Potentially Unwanted Program (PUP) that may enter your system together with other free applications. It comes in the form of a web add-on, which at the moment works solely on Mozilla Firefox. The developer of General Crawler remains unknown, which is always a bad sign about its legitimacy. During the setup process, you may be encouraged to load General Crawler as a helpful tool that should let you share files easily. If you select the 'Quick' menu instead of the recommended 'Advanced' one, you may not understand that there are questionable additions to the main software. The actual functionality of this PUP is very limited: it simply offers access to file-storing platforms, which you can visit directly just as well. On the other hand, the suspicious extension may change the settings of Mozilla Firefox thoroughly to make you visit sponsored pages.

This advertising activity may not benefit you because the sites that are in the partner network of General Crawler may not be reliable. Some of them may even represent a threat to your PC's well-being, so you should ignore all ads with the slogan 'Powered by General Crawler'. The commercial materials that this PUP may include are not limited to one type only. You may encounter a whole variety of them, including pop-ups, banners, interstitial ads, video elements and so on. Moreover, the dubious plugin may change the default search engine and the homepage. Usually, it sets another search platform that shows manipulated results as the starting site. General Crawler may hamper the performance of Mozilla Firefox because some ads may require a lot of resources to load. The course of action the experts suggest is to run a system scan with a suitable security tool to delete this PUP.

Technical Details

Registry Modifications

The following newly produced Registry Values are:

CLSID{CA4520F3-AE13-4FB1-A513-58E23991C86D}File name without pathGeneral Downloader on the Web.urlGeneral Downloader.lnkHKEY..\..\..\..{RegistryKeys}Software\GeneralDownloaderSOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\explorer\Browser Helper Objects\{CA4520F3-AE13-4FB1-A513-58E23991C86D}Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run\General DownloaderSOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\explorer\Browser Helper Objects\{CA4520F3-AE13-4FB1-A513-58E23991C86D}HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\[APPLICATION]\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall..{Uninstaller}{414C790F-E24E-461B-983A-2AD84474DE4A}_is1

Additional Information

The following directories were created:
%APPDATA%\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\General Downloader%AppData%\General Downloader%PROGRAMFILES%\General Downloader%PROGRAMFILES(x86)%\General Downloader
The following URL's were detected:
general-crawler.com
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