Your reactions to this post deeply concern me. I do believe this is a serious problem you should at least entertain investigating whomever you have an agreement with in regards to bundling their stuff into your installer.
Those domains its communicating with have several hits on known malware/RATs reports. For instance, https://www.maltiverse.com/sample/a98b1 ... 38233c50b7.
Here is another that spawns the same type of .exe which turns out to be NJRAT malware -> https://www.hybrid-analysis.com/sample/ ... mentId=120
Your defensive attitude is what alarms me the most. Almost as if you might care more about your bundle agreement profits than your users security/safety.
Hole in one. I wouldn’t trust those admins to make me a cup of tea, and I agree that their attitude reeks of deception for selfish reasons. Nobody should ever trust their software again, full stop.
They earned their reputation as untrustworthy.
Whoever wrote these replies would probably do well in politics.
I do so because I hope other people will listen and stop doing business with them leading to a decrease in profit and THEN changed behaviour from the culprit.
There is lots of factual information. They are factually doing a lot of malware like behaviour in their installer and bundling software from questionable sources they have no control over. At best they are putting their customers at risk.
The only facts that can possible emerge is that its actually worse and customers are getting their identities stolen or some such.
Rabble rousing is literally the only way anything gets fixed.
>They are factually doing a lot of malware like behaviour in their installer and bundling software from questionable sources they have no control over.
Their explanation was that AV vendors flag their competitors, so now in the 'arms race', competitors have resorted to downloading individual bits from random URLs and then merging them together. While this would be a technique that malware software would use to possibly defeat security software, but hey, its also how torrents work. Tools can be used for good or bad.
https://www.howtogeek.com/207692/yes-every-freeware-download...
Of course there is trustworthy freeware. You can get it using Apt, Yum, Ninite, Chocolatey, Homebrew, or just by going to the actual site of a trustworthy software product.
The fact that the people who run most download sites are scum isn't a problem with the software. It's a problem with those sites.
ksk - many hn readers build using free software for places like google, amazon etc, that are trusted all the way up to places like the CIA. Seriously, please troll somewhere else. Basically no one working in almost any open source project wants to be working with an author that bundles in crapware, ESPECIALLY if the author doesn't actually even control the crapware. If you don't get why this is a bad idea you'll have to trust folks who use open source software regularly that this is a bad thing.