Steel Cut is one of the many adware developed by the company SuperWeb LLC. This company releases at least one new adware each week. It’s detected by some anti-virus software as the generic name BrowseFox, it’s not a dangerous virus but it remains a malicious program built with the only goal of increasing the author’s income.
In order to achieve it, Steel Cut shows ads within you favorite websites, sometimes as many as ten in one page, specially among e-commerce websites. They completely break the visual look of those websites, making you browser slower by the minute, sometimes it might not respond at all… The reason behind this is the increase in requests made to the browser needed to show this ads. Those ads will be tagged with one of these texts: ad by Steel Cut, Steel Cut Ads or powered by Steel Cut.
Besides this obvious visual annoyance, Steel Cut records data from your computer, including installed software, browsing history, visited websites, etc. The main reason for collecting this data is to be able to show you customized ads, but they could also be sold to others…
Usually Steel cut is installed when you don’t pay attention when downloading and installing freeware. In some cases it can be when installing updates or apps to play videos. Be careful if you find a website that’s offering to download this kind of things, and please don’t download anything they offer.
View full solution