Thank you for being a valued part of the CNET community. As of December 1, 2020, the forums are in read-only format. In early 2021, CNET Forums will no longer be available. We are grateful for the participation and advice you have provided to one another over the years.

Thanks,

CNET Support

General discussion

Easy WiFi Radar 1 - trojan

Apr 29, 2010 3:04AM PDT

I was recently recommended by the help desk of my broadband ISP (British Telecom) to download "Easy WiFi Radar". Naturally I did this from CNET, knowing that I wouldn't be infected by malware. AVG detected a trojan and (fortunately) I was not able to run the software. Imagine my shock when I returned to CNET to check user reviews (I usually do this first but the recommendation by BT put me off guard) and discovered loads of warnings about the trojan! I was still more surprised when I checked a month later to find that the download is still available on CNET.
Any chance this download will be removed soon? Are any other downloads vulnerable and how did this one get past CNET's "tested, malware free" guarantee?

Discussion is locked

- Collapse -
Trojan in download...
Apr 29, 2010 5:23AM PDT

Nick,

First, my apologies for your encounter. CNET does screen all files before making them available for download, but virus signatures are not always available for the particular piece of malware at the time of scanning (in this case, back in 2005). Even today, McAfee, Symantec, Microsoft, AVG, and others do not detect malware in that installer. However, the reports and alerts from a handful of other scanners (TrendMicro, Kaspersky, and A-Squared) indicate there's likely an infection that needs to be investigated.

That said, CNET staff do not actively monitor comments made on download.com. Rather, they rely on members using the Customer Help Center (link at the bottom of every page) to submit an email reporting any issues, such as broken links, malware infections, etc, to the support team. They'll respond within 3 business days and remedy the issue accordingly. It's possible you'll find other downloads that slipped through in years past, but by reporting problems you find you can help keep download.com a reliable place to download safe, trustworthy software.

Regards,
John


P.S. I am forwarding your report so that Easy WiFi Radar can be inspected and, assuming the reports are not false positives, removed from the site.

- Collapse -
Thanks John and Nick! I've reported this to the
Apr 29, 2010 5:55AM PDT

CNET Download.com team. They'll look into it. I will update with results when I hear back from them.

Thanks again!
-Lee

- Collapse -
Reporting Malware in Downloads
Apr 29, 2010 4:31PM PDT

Thanks John and Lee,
I hadn't noticed the link for reporting such problems, I was accustomed to assuming all would be OK. I think this applies to others too as I have since noticed similar reports in customer reviews of two other downloads (concerning splitting video files). I will find these downloads again and report them for investigation.
May I suggest you bring this more obviously to the attention of site users and keep this tremendously valuable resource clear of such nasty stuff?

- Collapse -
The link is at the footer of all CNET pages...
Apr 30, 2010 2:27AM PDT

At the bottom of any CNET page (in the black section) under the sub header "More information" there is a customer service link in which you can go to and contact our customer service team and report these type of problematic titles. Many times these titles as this one did, do return back as false positives, but then again we have had a few that came up as positives which were then removed from our site. It's always better to be safe than sorry.

Thanks to you Nick and all other members who care enough to report these items to us. We all appreciate you folks looking out for our site and our users.

Cheers!
-Lee

- Collapse -
Update, it was found to have a false positve...
Apr 30, 2010 2:20AM PDT

The Download.com team scanned the title and even updated it to the latest version, but found that all that the title, new or old version are still returning a false positive.

So the title is clean, just that some security utlities are flagging it as false positive for containing a Trojan.

I hope this helps.
-Lee