[xan92]

Around 2003/04 was installing Avast/AVG on my friends desktops/PCs was a wonderful freeware. I started working as a system administrator around 2007 when I did the same on a few office machines, I had noticed how they became rogue, By infecting healthy machines with malware and prompting to buy paid version for removal, I am not sure if anyone remembers this thing with Avast ?

[tluyben2]

They did not infect machines; they just popped up that it found all kinds of things that were not there at all and you should upgrade to fix the issue. That is also a rancid tactic but I think Norton (or Mcafee?) also did it (it has been a long time but I remember either or both of them trying to panic users into buying like that). After upgrading, it would scan and nothing would be found; or at least not what it said before upgrading.

[bitL]

Never understood how they survived that. Now they seem to be dominating their country's tech landscape. Market ended up rewarding sociopathic behavior. Pretty terrible.

[theklub]

I remember something similar but it wasn't infecting them it was just giving false positives and constantly popping up to upgrade. I can't remember which software it was, it may have been avast.

[rasz]

ZoneAlarm popup ~2004: "IP x.x.x.x is trying to HAXOR you!!1"

[w8rbt]

I have never heard this. Can you provide a link with more details?

[xan92]

This was my personal and honest experience with Avast. They were the first scareware pioneers, If you have used them as I did you would have noticed.

[w8rbt]

I did use it then and I never experienced that. I bet it was some unrelated coincidence. They would not do that.

[fgonzag]

Narrator: They did.

[techntoke]

What malware are you referring to? I never had this issue as well. I'm not saying you shouldn't question them, but the only thing I didn't like was they forced advertisements to use the free version. They were still orders of magnitude better than other AV providers, especially what they were selling at Best Buy.

[sneakernets]

Infecting machines with malware intentionally? They did this and are still allowed to sell product?

[b212]

This is BS. They never did that.