Avast Drops iYogi Support Over Pushy Scare Tactics

An anonymous reader writes "Antivirus maker Avast is suspending its relationship with iYogi, a company it has relied upon for the past two years to provide live customer support for its products. The move comes just one day after an investigation into iYogi showed the company was using the relationship to push expensive and unnecessary support contracts onto Avast users. In a blog post, Avast's CEO wrote, 'We had initial reports of this behavior a few weeks ago and met with iYogi's senior executives to ensure the behavior was being corrected. Thus, we were shocked to find out about Mr. Krebs' experience. As a consequence, we have removed the iYogi support service from our website and shortly it will be removed from our products.'"

Comments

Doesn't this happen all the time?

[Chrutil]

Or "It's like deja-vu, all over again. " as iYogi Berra would have said...

Re:Doesn't this happen all the time?

[booyoh]

I guess they weren't smarter than the average bear.

Re:Will iYogi sue Avast?

[Arker]

No, it's not just based on this one incident.

Let me explain that where I work I speak fairly often with customers who have dealt with these guys. As a result I did a little research a few weeks back. You can do the same, use the google.

Anyhow there's a quite long-running and very interesting thread on the Avast user forums about these guys. It has both some very good and some very bad experiences, which matches what I have heard personally. At any rate it's been an ongoing issue for some time and this appears to be the last straw - it certainly wasnt the first case like this though.

Hand in glove

[sstamps]

I uninstalled the Avast trial a couple months ago with extreme prejudice as the piece of shite CONSTANTLY interrupted everything I was doing every goddamned hour to tell me that the trial was going to expire in a couple WEEKS. It would minimize other apps (including games, full-screen videos, etc) so its little warning box could be seen. Yes, I turned off every notification option I could find in it, and it STILL harassed me, so into the refuse pile it went. Yet another idiot company I will never do business with ever again.

So, it comes as no surprise to me that they would hire such an aggressive "support" company. The glove fits the hand.

They both need to die in a fire and then rot in hell together.

Re:Hand in glove

[DigiShaman]

MS Security Essentials is licensed for home use only. I would go with that if you own this PC. Otherwise, Trend Micro and VIPRE anti-virus are not bad alternatives either.

Norton does a good job. But OMG is it bloated like a dead fat cow waiting to burst. McAfee is the binary reincarnate of Satan himself. Avoid at all cost unless you love watching servers being eaten and never booting up again.

Re:Hand in glove

[Baloroth]

Uhh, dude, Avast is free for non-commercial use. All you have to do is register it once a year, which takes about ~30 seconds. I've used it for ~2 years now. And you can set it so the box doesn't pop-up when you have a full-screen app running (don't recall how, I haven't touched the settings on it in over a year now).

I've also found it to be the most lightweight unobtrusive AV out there. I tried Avira once: never again. Practically hosed my friend's system and ran like shit on my netbook (that one did pop-up constant notifications, and I mean CONSTANT). By contrast, Avast isn't even noticeable on the netbook at all (original generation 1.6ghz, I was impressed), and I have never once seen it interrupt a full-screen program in my two years of using it. In case you cannot tell, I recommend it. Only issue I've had is that it wants to sandbox most Steam games when they first run (but when set to open them normally and not ask again, it works just fine).

Re:Hand in glove

[thaiceman]

"Norton does a good job. But OMG is it bloated like a dead fat cow waiting to burst." As much as I hate defending Norton I would suggest you take the time to actually review the newer versions, 2012 is indeed lite as hell and even the older versions while being bloated were always on par with the best defense on the market. That said If you are on /. there is a good chance you have more then one computer which means it might be more beneficial for you to try something like Symantec Endpoint Protection for your protection instead of the consumer grade Norton products. Ive used it for years and its always been consistently lighter weight then most consumer products and always gave a better degree of protection. Before I was using endpoint I was using Symantec AV. Corp. Ed. & a random 3rd party firewall. The only problem with Endpoint is you have to spend $200ish bucks on 5 client licenses because of the way they sell it.

Re:Hand in glove

[Orphaze]

MS Security Essentials is licensed for home use only.

That is wholly incorrect, and has been for some time now. From http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows/products/security-essentials: Microsoft Security Essentials is available for small businesses with up to 10 PCs.

Re:Will iYogi sue Avast?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm a spam cop over at reddit.com & we chased iyogi off the site LONG ago, they're spam, pure & simple, & we found links between iyogi & these "support staff" that phone you AT HOME to advise you your system is compromised

Re:Will iYogi sue Avast?

[billcopc]

Not at all. That was just the "mystery customer" call to confirm the shenanigans, after several users complained about it to Avast.

After RTFA (*gasp*), my interpretation is that iYogi is pretty much attempting customer fraud, by running bogus diagnostics and selling expensive solutions the customer does not need - and dare I say, probably won't fix anything besides the fake alerts. Over here in Canada/U.S., that's a serious offense that can land you in jail. I don't know how India's criminal code relates, but even from a purely business perspective, iYogi is still defrauding its client, Avast, as they are spending their client's time and money to convince users to fall for a fake diagnostic scam. That's a very good reason to terminate the contract, and then sue the company.

Now I guess the question becomes: how hard is it to sue an Indian company into the ground ?

Let me count the ways...

[wbr1]

...that outsourcing has benefited our corporations, and our economy. Joy.

Re:Will iYogi sue Avast?

[RobertLTux]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Tylenol_murders

tl;dr version back in the day somebody tampered with Tylenol caps to add poison which resulted in a big recall and most likely a few lawsuits.

Re:Anti-Virus money hole!

[BronsCon]

I use all three operating systems on a daily basis. Here's my breakdown:
CentOS 6.2 as a host OS on my laptop
Win7 Ultimate as a VM guest on my laptop
OSX as a VM guest on my laptop
CentOS 5.8 on my server
Debian 5.0.9 and 6.0.4 on servers at work

Why is CentOS the host OS on my laptop? Because two of the four Macs at my workplace have had viruses and the Windows version of VMWare Workstation doesn't play a nicely with OSX guests as the Linux version does. That's right, I chose Windows or Linux over OSX for security reasons and chose Linux over Windows for performance reasons. Yes, that distills down to "I chose Windows over OSX for security reasons." and that is based entirely on my use of both systems, side by side, on a daily basis, for several years.

I remember trojans and viruses from the DOS days, as well. Ahh, the good ol' DOS days, when getting infected meant you executed something you shouldn't have. Wait... That still happens; that's how Macs get infected. That's how Linux installs get infected. That's the vast majority of how Windows installs get infected. Windows 7 defaults to "locked-down and secure", questions you if you try to do something stupid, and alerts you if an application tries to do something stupid (UAC); Linux, in general, will nag you if you try to do something stupid and alert you if an application tries to do something stupid (asking for root/your password); OSX halfheartedly does this, but in my experience it's trivial to bypass (wait for the user to authorize a legit application and piggyback on that authorization). Some Linux distros have similar functionality to OSX and allow the same exploit, and somehow this is considered "good enough" for a desktop system.

At any rate, all 3 systems ship in a secure state and all 3 can be made just as vulnerable to worms by exposing services to a network. OSX users who still believe they're immune are in for a rude awakening, very soon. This is where Linux and OSX users differ; Linux users are aware that exploits exist for every platform and know that countermeasures must be taken. It's one thing that Microsoft has finally started doing right, by the way, they've started driving the point home that your system is only as secure as how you use it; again, something Linux users have known from the start.

Mac fans will catch on some day, I hope.

Re:Anti-Virus money hole!

[Aryden]

Here are a few http://macscan.securemac.com/spyware-list/

Regardless of whether you have had or haven't had virus/spyware issues on OSX, when the CEO of the company that makes it advises you to use an actual AV, you probably should. Not to mention, if one OSX system on your network is compromised, all of them are likely to be so, or says a study posted not too long ago (can't find it atm).

The point it, you'd have to be bonehead stupid to nor protect yourself regardless of what OS you run on your systems.

Firsthand account

[Pranadevil2k]

I dealt with these guys once, and I definitely understand what they mean by 'aggressive tactics.' I bought a new Linksys router several months back and was having trouble getting the wi-fi working, so I looked on Google for the Linksys support and the iYogi site was the first thing to pop up. Since I couldn't find a support number to call at Linksys's website I didn't really have any choice but to call the one number I could find.
So I describe the problem to the guy and he has me download some java program to screen-share with me, then has me run through the various troubleshooting steps... So far no real problems. But when he couldn't find a solvable issue (ie: hardware problem) he asked me to open regedit and open a couple random keys, then told me my registry was corrupt but they could sell me their service which would fix my registry so the router would work.
I'm decent enough at fixing computers myself to know that was a load of crap, but Average Joe Consumer would be pretty far in the dark. Not only was my registry fine, but the router was defective, so their service would have been completely worthless.

Re:Anti-Virus money hole!

[BronsCon]

The majority of Windows virii are detected by heuristic realtime scanners before being sent off to AV vendors for analysis. I'll quote myself:

Also, because OSX users don't typically run antivirus software and those who do typically don't run a realtime scanner with decent heuristics, it is possible (read: probable) that there are more OSX virii out there that we don't know about than there are that we do.

Further, the .THT is not a file extension, it is a malware class abbreviation; it identifies the malware as a Trojan Horse Threat (typically, a trojan would be marked with .TRJ, but some vendors use different terminology). You can read more on this specific thread here, including typical filenames used by this threat (which, by the way, do not have extensions) Since you've never heard of AppleScript.TrojanHorseThreat and it is still out there, with new infections being reported on a fairly regular basis, perhaps you should click that little link.

Or, stay ignorant and be taken by surprise; isn't that what you used to look down on us PC users for, until fairly recently?