How To Hijack Your Own Windows System With Bundled Downloads

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.

Comments

Re:Application installers suck.

[houghi]

Why does Windows keep this antiquated process around?

Liability? The software that people install is not Microsoft software, nor is it compiled by Microsoft.

With Linux there are also some third party install programs. Most because they are not open source.

So it is not Windows that keep this antiquated process. It is the people who write the programs who all have a different idea on how to do things. Just having a discussion if a user should or should not have an option as default will give various answers.

https://ninite.com/ will do already a lot already to overcome that.

Obviously what Microsoft could easily do is make something similar and ask developers to give the programs to them in a certain format. I am also sure that Microsoft does not want to be a reseller.