Mycleanpc, Cyberdefender, and the absurd

Man, I never knew getting a job would be such a quagmire. I started working for a company, Cyberdefender, and the experience was generally disturbing. I guess since I haven't been using windows for the last two years, I didn't really know that there were such brazen companies out there willing to prey on unwary individuals in order to make a buck. Basically, it took me two days to realize that the software that the company pushes is basically malicious, trapping people into buying it, and even trapping people into buying tech support contracts. They also push a software called malwarebytes to clean systems as well, which is just as deceptive as their own software.

I didn't realize when I started the job, that Cyberdefender and mycleanpc.com are one and the same. I probably shouldn't even care. I don't even use windows, and I don't see windows becoming as secure as linux distros like Debian and Ubuntu, simply because of the number of great developers who are free to modify the source code to secure the system as necessary against fraudulent software providers. There also really isn't a market for deceptive software vendors in gnu/linux distros, maybe if the user base was wider, it would be a different story.

Anyway, as kind of an experiment, I decided to run malwarebytes (MBAM), cyberdefender's free regclean, spybot search and destroy, and avg antivirus on my ubuntu desktop using wine. MBAM ran, it found 21 supposed errors. Cyberdefender found 121. Spybot found 0. And avg antivirus wouldn't even install. I attached a few of the screenshots which I thought were kind of absurd:






The sad part about this, is proving that Cyberdefender is really poor software would probably be simple for a windows user with a clean install. Apparently this person did it, and found the same problem that I did, that the software asserts that there are errors, but it doesn't detect anything.

Anyway, stay away from cyberdefender and malwarebytes. Use spybot s&d, avg antivirus, and most importantly, use some common sense. Don't click on phishing advertisements. And even better, if you can, switch to a linux distribution. I highly recommend ubuntu for its ease of use, and you can try it out by downloading a live cd.