As is the case with the average adware application, SearchMine isn’t particularly harmful. It’s an awful nuisance, though. A victim cannot adjust the web browsing settings and visits searchmine.net non-stop. As part of the attack, the PUA adds a rogue enterprise policy in Google Chrome. By the way, this browser seems to be the most severely affected – perhaps due to its popularity among Mac fans. The policy trick, combined with a device profile that the infection creates on a Mac as well, allows the bad code to manage Internet preferences that are normally up to the user. This persistence adds up to the annoyance effect. The only significant risk stemming from the SearchMine incursion boils down to privacy encroachment. The adware is known to track down various facets of its victim’s online behavior. This includes information about the visited sites, search terms, and merchants the user purchases from. These details are covertly sent to the browser hijacker’s operators who may sell them to third parties or mishandle them on their own by chasing the person with targeted ads on searchmine.net homepage and unrelated web resources.