Hacker News Reader

Comment by xan92 | Hacker News Reader

Around 2003/04 was installing Avast/AVG on my friends desktops/PCs was a wonderful freeware. I started working as a system administrator around 2007 when I did the same on a few office machines, I had noticed how they became rogue, By infecting healthy machines with malware and prompting to buy paid version for removal, I am not sure if anyone remembers this thing with Avast ?

View on HN

They did not infect machines; they just popped up that it found all kinds of things that were not there at all and you should upgrade to fix the issue. That is also a rancid tactic but I think Norton (or Mcafee?) also did it (it has been a long time but I remember either or both of them trying to panic users into buying like that). After upgrading, it would scan and nothing would be found; or at least not what it said before upgrading.

Never understood how they survived that. Now they seem to be dominating their country's tech landscape. Market ended up rewarding sociopathic behavior. Pretty terrible.

I remember something similar but it wasn't infecting them it was just giving false positives and constantly popping up to upgrade. I can't remember which software it was, it may have been avast.

ZoneAlarm popup ~2004: "IP x.x.x.x is trying to HAXOR you!!1"

I have never heard this. Can you provide a link with more details?

This was my personal and honest experience with Avast. They were the first scareware pioneers, If you have used them as I did you would have noticed.

I did use it then and I never experienced that. I bet it was some unrelated coincidence. They would not do that.

Narrator: They did.

What malware are you referring to? I never had this issue as well. I'm not saying you shouldn't question them, but the only thing I didn't like was they forced advertisements to use the free version. They were still orders of magnitude better than other AV providers, especially what they were selling at Best Buy.

Infecting machines with malware intentionally? They did this and are still allowed to sell product?

This is BS. They never did that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com