Adware Removal Guide : Premier Opinion

Published March 13th, 2015 at 9:51 AM EDT , modified March 13th, 2015 at 9:51 AM EDT

PremierOpinion, aka OpinionSpy, is marketing research software that collects all manner of data about your system and your internet usage and transmits it back to the creators of the software. It first appeared back in 2010, and was quickly labeled as malware at the time, although it never seemed to me to be real malware. PremierOpinion resurfaced in February of 2015, being distributed by CNET’s untrustworthy Download.com site.

Removal

The full capabilities of this new PremierOpinion variant have not been published by any security companies to-date, but the old PremierOpinion was said to have backdoor capabilities, meaning the people behind it had remote access to infected systems. It is possible that the new version has the same capabilities.

The safest way to remove this spyware from your computer would be to erase the hard drive and reinstall everything from scratch. In my opinion, this is probably overkill. However, those who want that extra assurance should take those measures. Those who are willing to just remove the known components of PremierOpinion can follow the directions below.

Delete the PremierOpinion browser extension. (See Identifications > Examine Browser Extensions for instructions on how to locate your browser extensions.)

Move the following items to the trash. Note that, if you don’t know how to locate a file or folder based on the paths that I will give in the instructions, you should read Locating files from paths.

/Applications/PremierOpinion
/Library/LaunchDaemons/PremierOpinion.plist

Some of these items can only be deleted by an admin user, and will require entry of that admin user’s password to delete.

Finally, restart your computer to finish the removal process. You can empty the trash after restarting the computer.

You may need to change the home page and search engine settings in your browser’s preferences.

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