For the last year or two I’ve been using and have been very happy with the Advanced System Care anti-virus and security program from iObit. I even paid for an annual subscription, which I had never done before because of the free programs you could always use.
Well no more! This week I got a pop-up from iObit asking if I wanted to try another one of their programs… I forgot which one, maybe a defragger? Whenever I download software I always look for those check-mark boxes that will install something else like a toolbar and not seeing one this time I went ahead with the download.
It turns out that this program also installed something called Spigot which changed the default search on all my browsers to Yahoo. It did it in a very devious way: when clicking a new tab in Chrome I usually have a Google search page come up but this malware had a bogus Google search page appear and when entering text the results would come from Yahoo.
The worst part is that it took me the better part of a day to get rid of the malware. I’m amazed iObit would let this happen since they’re a fairly well-known company and ASC is used by many people, although from checking on the Internet iObit may be based in China, in case that means anything.
I also can’t believe Yahoo would associate themselves with this hellish Spigot malware.
Needless to say every iObit piece of software has been removed from all my PCs. It’s back to Avast and AVG for me! So if you use anything from iObit, be careful!