Stop Wbredirect.com in Safari, Chrome, Firefox on Mac OS X
Wbredirect dot com is the designation given to a potentially unwanted app that works as a mix of adware and a browser hijacker and may have quietly landed on your Mac without your knowledge or consent.
Potentially unwanted apps (abbreviated as PUAs) are a type of software that lives in the grey area between high threat level malware and regular applications. While a PUA is certainly not as dangerous as a virus or a file-encrypting ransomware, it will still have a negative net impact on your experience as a computer user.
Adware such as Wbredirect dot com will often inject itself into your browser, in the form of a browser extension. Once the extension has slipped in place, almost always quietly and without explicit user consent, you will start seeing a lot more advertisements on pages than you did before.
In the case of Wbredirect, you will find opening new tabs on your browser always loads up the Wbredirect dot com page. Some research suggests that Wbredirect can actually resolve the same URL to a number of different pages. The issue with this is that you want to use your browser, you don't want to be constantly looped to a series of e-commerce websites you never looked for.
Other researchers suggest that Wbredirect may have been linked to a fake phone computer support scam at one point in time. Other research indicates that Wbredirect has at some point also acted as a garden variety adware and browser hijacker, simply injecting ads into pages you visit and aggressively causing pop-up ads to appear, wasting both system resourced and bandwidth in the process.
Unwanted apps such as Wbredirect dot com usually end up on your system as a result of running a bundle installer. Those are commonly found on free download website and will very often contain a normal, completely legitimate program.
The issue is, just as often, there are potentially unwanted apps that are piggy-backing inside the same installer package and their presence is very poorly disclosed, with most users never even realizing they installed more apps in addition to the one they searched for.
This is why it is always a good idea to only download apps and installers from locations with stringent curation such as the App Store or the official website of the app's developer or publisher. In this way you are guaranteed to avoid any low-quality websites and potential issues related to installing PUAs on your system.
Potentially unwanted apps that hijack your browser search engine and display excessive ads may also lead to further malware-ridden pages, so just because the PUA is not very dangerous on its own doesn't mean it can't lead to more serious issues with your system's health.
