Google threat analysis selectively applied

Michael Nelson nelson_mikel at yahoo.com
Wed Aug 14 11:45:08 PDT 2013



A friend of mine, not a security jock, recently needed to cleanse her system (computer system, that is). She was advised to download Malwarebytes.  So she went to Google, and selected the top hit.  It had the pale green background that indicates (to those who know) that it was a commercial hit.  Of course, she did not know that, but so what?  She merrily clicked on it.  It's Google's top hit, right?  Must be well-vetted, safe, etc.

The install led her through all sorts of other installs, and the end result was that she had a quite old version of Malwarebytes, and loads of adware on her computer.  She needed a very thorough cleaning then, to get rid of that stuff. Hope there's no malware left. Sheesh.

The point is that Google was boasting recently about its wonderful machine learning that, unprompted, detected bogus used car ads in China.  It's perfectly clear that they could check the nasty Malwarebytes repackager that paid them.  Pretty poor behavior on Google's part.

Mike
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