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Somehow Chromium Browser on my Ubuntu 14.04 (I suspect Chrome synching from a Windows 10 machine to my Ubuntu Chrome) has been infected with CloudScout.

I have uninstalled Chromium Browser included deleted everything in the .config folder for Chromium. Still when I reinstall Chromium I am disappointed to see the ads are back and destroying my happiness :(

Is there a way I can completely install Chromium including all settings and all added apps etc.

To date I have followed these Q&As.

How do I completely uninstall Google Chrome and Chromium?

sudo apt-get remove chromium-browser
sudo apt-get purge chromium-browser
rm ~/.config/chromium/ -rf

The only other issue I have is that if I roll over the Classic Menu Indicator 0.07 (installed app) it shows me a menu item for Chromium Apps. Either the malware is reinitializing from something inside there or it has gone outside of Chromium and attached itself to my system.

Until then it is goodbye Chromium and hello Firefox.

Any direction or help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks

Community
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Jay Killeen
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2 Answers2

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The dpkg/apt package system of ubuntu will ensure that if you purge the chromium-browser package, you will also remove all other packages depending on that.

# kill running instances, remove files
killall -9 chromium-browser
rm ~/.config/chromium/ -rf
# uninstall
sudo apt-get purge chromium-browser
# aaand reinstall
sudo apt-get install chromium-browser

Note that some application launchers still do display launcher Entries & Icons for applications removed, if they only load that list at their startup time. This isnt an issue, using those buttons will most likely lead to a precise error saying that the application could not be located (any more). Restart those applications (or, if you dont know how, the system) and it'll go away.

killall classicmenu-indicator && classicmenu-indicator

Anyway, uninstalling the chromium package is probably NOT what you wanted to do. If there is a malicious addon in your chrome, then thats completely user-side and should be fixed withouth system administration tools. If, however, you got a system-wide infection, you cannot easily resolve it that way anyway.

anx
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  • Cheers. It is odd though, I do a reinstall and within about 30 seconds of loading up the ads pop back in. I was always under the impression that these sort of attacks are rare (if not impossible) on a linux machine. Really boggling. I'll keep trying and will do your killall suggestion – Jay Killeen Mar 18 '15 at 10:31
  • Perfect! That seems to have fixed it. I'll link to here for the other answers out there because I tried most of them and this fixed it. It seems odd though, my inkling is that the malware was pushed over from a Windows 10 machine through a dodgy screencasting program called Camstudio (last time I follow a Lifehacker.com recommendation). – Jay Killeen Mar 18 '15 at 10:49
  • Is it possible that it was synced to chromium on Ubuntu via chrome on Windows 10 if I was logged in via my Google account and had sync activated? – Jay Killeen Mar 18 '15 at 12:08
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For me, I found it wasn't enough to remove ~/.config/chromium . I also had to remove my cache for Chromium, too : ~/.cache/chromium .

Horrid problem to have, btw.

Pepe Lebuntu
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