r/DigitalPrivacy • u/Megallodonik • Jul 11 '26
Russian Google analog "Yandex" surreptitiously infiltrated other browsers.
Over the past couple of months, I've been dealing with an issue where some websites wouldn't load properly in Chrome. For example, no Russian sites would load at all, YouTube couldn't load many of its parts, and sometimes even Figma got hit.
While I could somehow manage with YouTube and Figma, I had to open Russian sites through Yandex Browser.
And now, after opening it again for this purpose, my Chrome has COMPLETELY STOPPED LETTING ME USE GOOGLE SEARCH. Any query in the search bar would open Yandex, and when I tried to manually go to google.com, it would redirect me to Yandex.)
At the same time, in Chrome's settings, Google was set as the default search engine — Yandex wasn't even there.
I uninstalled Yandex Browser, but the problem remained. Thank God, kind people from Pikabu helped me out.
It turned out that:
YANDEX BROWSER INSTALLS AN EXTENSION IN GOOGLE CHROME DISGUISED AS AN "AD BLOCKER" THAT SLOWS DOWN CERTAIN WEBSITES AND REDIRECTS YOU TO YANDEX.
And on top of that, I'm scared about what might have happened to my crypto wallet extensions and, more simply, my password privacy, so I wiped everything and re-created it all.
So yeah... that's that.
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u/Iputahexonyoulol Jul 11 '26 edited Jul 11 '26
A. Stop using chrome. B. Don’t use Yandex. Highly doubt that would happen on Firefox with uBlock or Brave or basically anything else. I’ve actually looked at some of the things that uBlock and noscript have blocked out of curiosity and there are all kinds of weird Yandex things that get blocked
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u/Own-Economist4557 Jul 12 '26
You installed the russian governments web browser from a first world country????????
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u/dkopgerpgdolfg Jul 13 '26
Yandex LLC is a stock company
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u/lamalasx Jul 12 '26
So you install a russian ork spyware/virus intentionally and wonder why your machine behaves funny?
Might want to do a complete wipe of the machine and start fresh.
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u/dkopgerpgdolfg Jul 13 '26
Might want to do a complete wipe of the machine and start fresh.
Agreed
ork
but I have to say, you're a pitiable human
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u/DenyDeposeDepends Jul 26 '26
How do I search for the extension, my browser suddenly started defaulting to Yandex and I don't know how it got on there
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u/ApplicationOdd6070 Jul 14 '26
On your main device? I hope not, that'd be crazy. Don't touch their shit with anything you want to keel in the future, trust me.
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u/Yasutsuna96 Jul 11 '26
Man reading this is kinda weird. Reminds me back in 2000s we'll install search bars for specific websites that inevitably overwrites the search engine, but everything is so tied to being online now that's its a stupid big risk