What is the Baseball Start Browser Hijacker?

Baseball Start is the name of a rogue browser extension that acts as a browser hijacker.

The Baseball Start extension is advertised as a convenient way to get baseball news right in your browser. In addition to this advertised functionality, it also makes a number of unannounced changes to your browser, that classify it as a hijacker.

Browser hijackers are applications or browser extensions that make quiet changes to settings inside your browser, including home page and default search engine. The reason why browser hijackers are considered potentially unwanted applications is that those changes take place without proper disclosure and without obtaining user consent.

In the case of Baseball Start, the site being pushed is nstart dot online - a fake search engine that uses Bing for its generated results, after bouncing the search queries through onlinesear dot ch.

Having a browser hijacker on your system is never desirable, given that a lot of them can collect data on your search queries and browsing behaviors.

In some cases, removing a hijacker distributed as a browser extension is easy and only takes opening the browser's extensions and add-ons page. In other cases, you may need to use a dedicated anti-malware solution to rid your system of hijackers that have established some form of persistence.