omg I feel dirty

I was just setting up a new boot drive and putting all my must-haves on it when I searched online for SpamSieve. I was on a phone call so I was extremely remiss to not notice that the top hit, which I clicked, was not c-command. I kept clicking and ended up downloading a .dmg for SpamSieve 2.9.15 which again, I just clicked on willy-nilly as I chatted my computer’s security away. Suddenly I was shocked by the installer’s request to install MacKeeper, one of the most hated malware products/companies I’ve ever had the displeasure of repeatedly uninstalling from friends’ and family members’ computers. And then two more apps came up in the installer which I was able to decline but now I’m all panicked and checking my network settings to make sure they weren’t up to their usual chicanery.

My question is whether this is SpamSieve being hijacked by the exact sort of evil that it was designed to protect against? Or is this being done with the collaboration of C-Command. Please say it isn’t the latter. Here is the link, it will try to initiate the download right away but I’m running Avast so I think there’s no other danger.

http://spamsieve.onfreedownload.com/download/file/id/1226132/

Thanks for a great product otherwise. I’ve been using it for years.

I would be interested to know which search engine and query you used.

It has nothing to do with us. The only legit places to get SpamSieve are from C-Command and our vendor partners (listed here). Unfortunately, there are a lot scammy of download sites that package MacKeeper and other malware into their disk images. Lots of Mac apps are affected.

this was the search: https://search.yahoo.com/yhs/search?p=spam+sieve&ei=UTF-8&hspart=mozilla&hsimp=yhs-002

top hit was this evil:

http://spamsieve.onfreedownload.com/?lp=bing&tg=us&os=mac&utm_source=Bing&utm_medium=CPC&utm_campaign=Search

I hope this helps you get those bastids.

on a side note I just realized that my SpamSieve 2 license was purchased in 2004. that’s very generous. extremely even. it makes MacKeeper et al look even scummier to me, piggybacking on your product like that. I’ve only experienced them as web popups and I had no idea this slip-streaming had become a thing.

Thanks. It looks like this is the top result because they are paying Yahoo/Bing for a search ad. I will see if there is a way to report this as a malware scam.

I’ve added a page that lists known bad download sites, to hopefully reduce any confusion about this.