Taboola Ads on Mac Browsers
Taboola Ads is the name of a potentially unwanted application that acts as a browser hijacker. The most common way Taboola Ads may have ended up on your Mac is through a bundle installer.
Potentially unwanted applications or PUAs are software that falls somewhere between legitimate apps and malware. While a potentially unwanted app will not damage your computer the way a virus of ransomware might, it will still impair your browsing experience and the general way you use your system.
You will know you have Taboola Ads installed on your Mac if your favorite browser suddenly starts displaying a significant number of ads where there were none before, including your search result pages. In most cases the ads will have a brief text label indicating their origin. This label may read "Brought to you by Taboola", "Sponsored links by Taboola" or simply "by Taboola".
Those ads will appear injected in web pages that do not have them unless you have Taboola Ads installed on your system. This includes your search result pages showing those unsolicited ads, as well as regular websites that are now suddenly laden with ads that may even obscure the original website content in places.
Taboola Ads may appear in any browser you use, as the PUA has the ability to affect any browser, whether you use the Safari that comes with your MacOS or Chrome and Firefox.
Taboola Ads may also display pop-up advertising windows if you click on a blank spot on a page, as the page is likely modified to have an ad overlay by the browser hijacker. Additionally, you may find your browser now suddenly opens a number of tabs on launch that were not there before, even if you fully close everything. You will be able to tell that those new tabs contain content injected there by Taboola Ads by the "trc.taboola.com" that will usually show up in the address bar on those new tabs.
The heavy ad bombardment, including pop-up ads and advertising injected into pages, will negatively impact your browsing experience and may cause significant system slowdown, including wasting your bandwidth to load all the new ad content.
The way potentially unwanted apps infiltrate your system is usually through bundlers, also called bundle installers. Those are software installer packages that will contain multiple applications. While the user may originally search for a legitimate app, downloading and running its bundle installer from some free download websites may also quietly install PUPs such as Taboola Ads.
This is why it is very important to be careful with your download sources and preferably only obtain apps from their official developer or publisher websites, or the app store. If you absolutely must get an application from a similar bundle installer, make sure you read all the fine print and select "custom install", so you can opt out of any potentially unwanted apps that may be piggy-backing inside the install package. Those usually install without asking for explicit permission when the "express install" option is chosen.
