Friday, August 7, 2015

The new trojan horses

So I had to provision a remote employee's Windows laptop.  One piece of software they needed was OpenOffice, the free Microsoft Office replacement.  I did a search, grabbed the software and halfway in I knew I had made a mistake.  The URL looked right...no...wait it wasn't openoffice.org like I thought.  It was www.openoffice.us.com!   Crap!  I waited for the install to finish (it was almost done anyway) and, with a grumble and a sigh, I started the search for whatever crapware was installed.  Once everything was uninstalled I ran a scan and started over.

You would think I'd learn.  The employee's browser had the default search page set to Yahoo.  That was the beginning of my problems.  Yahoo is becoming the new Ask from what I can see.  The first results in any search, especially for software, will be scamware peddlers most of the time.  Google doesn't appear to be going down this road fortunately.  

Frankly, I'm sick of the whole thing.  Adobe and Oracle both try to install unwanted software that you are automatically opted in for and typically are part of security updates (in the case of Oracle you get Ask which is just plain immoral).  I should have known better, but I was in a rush and just didn't pay attention.  Part of me really wants to do something about this, but I haven't formulated a proper response yet.  I'm sure I'm not the only victim or else they wouldn't still be doing this.  That and I regularly have to clean up other people's computers.   Something ought to be done about these people.  But what?