ZoneAlarm Employs Scare Tactics Against Its Users

snydeq writes "Check Point Software appears to be ripping a page from the 'scum it claims to fight,' running a scare-tactic warning dialog to frighten users into upgrading to a paid version of the company's ZoneAlarm firewall product. Preying on fears of ZeuS.Zbot, the Check Point warning dialog tells users their PCs 'may be in danger' without having found ZeuS.Zbot, nor having checked to see whether you're running an antivirus product. 'The program doesn't care if you're infected with ZeuS.Zbot, or if you have protection in place. It just wants to sell you an upgrade to the firewall that may or may not detect future ZeuS.Zbot variants' activities — some day.' Check Point's customers have inundated the ZoneAlarm forums with complaints."

Comments

ZoneAlarm was backdoored, right?

[equex]

I thought ZoneAlarm got outed for essentially being a backdoor some years ago ? I stopped using it then and never looked back.

Re:ZoneAlarm was backdoored, right?

[Tanktalus]

Googling for "car colour theft", one of the top hits is an article suggesting painting your car pink. Not sure if the cure is worse than the disease, but that's your call to make for your own situation.

Re:Summary is correct

[Blue Stone]

Yeah, I ditched Zone Alarm for Comodo some time ago after ZA got bought out by Checkpoint. I think it was that the newer post-buy-out versions of the software kept re-ckecking the "automatic updates" option in the preferences and kept giving itself permission to access the internet, despite me explicitly blocking it. Several instances of this and I thought, 'crikey, the new owners are a bit dodgy' and jumped ship to Comodo.

Can't say I'm surprised to see them plumet down the 'sacrifice integrity to serve our bottom line' route. (That's also why I ditched AVG).