How To Hijack Your Own Windows System With Bundled Downloads

Posted by timothy on Tuesday January 13, 2015 @03:20AM from the would-be-funny-if-not-evil dept.

How-To Geek has tested and described something that you probably shouldn't do on your own computer -- unless, as they did, you do it on a virtual machine just for this purpose. Namely, they downloaded 10 of the most popular software titles from download.com, clicking through as a naive user might, accepting the defaults or the most obvious Next buttons, as most users surely do. They note that download.com's stated policies certainly look good on-screen; it says that the site comprehensively screens for, and disallows, malware of all kinds. But malware of various kinds, even if much of it is in a grey zone rather than actually malicious, is a fair description of what the authors encountered as they clicked through. Bundled software, some pieces of it at odds with others, was attached to each of the downloads, and from download to installation the process by design foisted more and more junk on their system, even if some of the bundled junk could have been avoided by a user jaded by previous hijackings. The conclusion: [N]o matter how technical you might be, most of the installers are so confusing that there's no way a non-geek could figure out how to avoid the awful. So if you recommend a piece of software to somebody, you are basically asking them to infect their computer. And it doesn’t matter which antivirus you have installed — we've actually done this experiment a number of times with different antivirus vendors, and most of them completely ignored all of the bundled crapware. Avast did a pretty good job this time compared to some of the other vendors, but it didn't block all of it for sure. There are also no safe freeware download sites because as you can clearly see in the screenshots in this article, it isn't just CNET Downloads that is doing the bundling it's EVERYBODY. The freeware authors are bundling crapware, and then lousy download sources are bundling even more on top of it. It's a cavalcade of crapware.

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Re:Application installers suck. by Richard_at_work · 2015-01-13 03:52 · Score: 5, Informative

Why does Windows keep this antiquated process around?
Chocolatey.
https://chocolatey.org/
Re:Application installers suck. by The+MAZZTer · 2015-01-13 03:54 · Score: 5, Informative

Microsoft tried the easy install, walled garden approach with Windows 8. It didn't go over well.
I don't think that's quite right. by digsbo · 2015-01-13 05:13 · Score: 5, Informative

I'm pretty sure you're mistaken there. I've done installers with both RPMs and MSIs. Not my specialty, but I have some experience.
In Windows, you don't need elevated privileges to install an application to a user-specific location. You only need it to install system-wide. The registry keys to track Windows Installer components can be referenced from either location in the registry (the administrative access part, or the user-only part).
It's not all that different from RPM, though really it's a little easier to do user-only installs with Windows Installer. You need administrative privileges to install system wide w/ RPM. You can also do a bunch of RPM hacking to install to a user-only RPM database and installation folder without root, so long as you specify that you're running RPM against a non-default RPM database location, and someone went to a lot of trouble to permit user only installs in your RPM spec file. There's a bit of work to enable this in regular MSIs, too, but it's actually better supported that under RPM.