How to fix Chrome updates not functioning after infection
One of my computers got infected a few weeks back with some malware. The malware got through a corporate AV firewall, Microsoft Security Essentials, and to some extent Malwarebytes (during the cleanup) and didn’t do much other than redirect advertising and screw up any attempts to remove it.
I did the usual malware removal, the malware did the “well good luck getting any browser to ever browse again,” to which I replied sure thing, and things seemed fine except today I noticed that Chrome updates were not happening and I had a note that updates had been disabled by the system administrator.
The nasty little malware had disabled auto updates in order to make it easier to reinfect later down the line.
This can be resolved fairly quickly by hitting start, run “regedit” and navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Google\Update. There you should find an entry called UpdateDefault which needs to be set to 1 and is probably set to 0 when you’re looking at it.
Alternately you can delete the Update policy registry entry unless you use it as it doesn’t appear to be required unless you’re specifically setting a policy.
Once that’s done, restart Chrome, or reboot the system since Chrome has so many weird processes running all the time, and you should be good to go.
That registry entry doesn’t appear unless a policy is actually set up, and judging by my machines it just doesn’t appear unless forced as there are no Google policies in my registry.
