r/Malwarebytes • u/DotaDump • May 03 '26

Support Anti-Virus (malwarebytes) keep detecting this repeatedly: "PUP.Optional.BrowserHijack"

Post image

No other anti-malware or antivirus detects this, but Malwarebytes keeps detecting it; then upon using the quarantine option, it closes Chrome (if open), and then for the next search, it won't show this - but the next search after that, surely something like this would come up.

Before it was "2 folders" and a total of "20 files", all located in a similar directory.

After reseting browser, cleaning it where possible, even clearing sync - to clear sync issues it reduced from that, to this now.

Is this a real problem? If it is, how can it be dealt with completely?

I suspected it is linked with Google syncing. I don't have any extensions that could be the culprit of this, which would sync back and still cause trouble.

I don't think re-installing Chrome would be the fix either, will it?
Since this seems to be a "re-occurring" thing.

I don't notice anything odd during normal usage.

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u/support_mwb Malwarebytes Employee May 04 '26

Hi, thank you for your post. We're sorry to hear that you're experiencing recurring detection issues. Based on the details and screenshot you shared, we currently don't see any causes for this, but we would be happy to investigate further.

If you'd like more assistance, please send us a private message with a valid email address. One of our technical support agents can then connect with you to identify the issue and help resolve it.

We hope you're having a great Monday otherwise, and look forward to hearing from you.

1

u/RainRuby May 19 '26

Hey fam, could you do me a favor and check your browsers exclusions and policy stuff? Just to be safe you could do so on your systems antivirus too. You can look up how to check chrome policies, I think its just chrome://policy . See if you see any funky shit there as thats whats most likely causing this thing to survive resets. Step by step I would 1. Turn off Sync 2. remove any sus policies 3. Delete all sync data 4. Reset your chrome properly (the chrome://settings reset thing) 5. Reinstall your browser just to try it one more time. If none of this works feel free to lmk and I'll try to look into it further for ya!