Blog for hpHosts, and whatever else I feel like writing about ....

Friday 20 August 2010

De-listings: AdvancedDefrag.com and MessengerPlus

AdvancedDefrag.com has now been de-listed, after a test of their latest version showed it no longer met the inclusion criteria (the major improvement to their software is that their trial version, is actually a trial now, not a demo).

After years of bundling the Swizzor trojan (created by Patchou so I'm told), Patchou/Yuna Software, have finally removed Swizzor from their MessengerPlus installer. This removal came after years of Patchou's telling everyone the AVs and other security companies were in the wrong, and their detections were F/P's.

Although it's taken years, the most important thing, regardless of the fact neither Yuna Software nor Patchou (inclusive of absolutely no mention of this removal on any of their sites) have seen fit to mention it, is that it's been removed. MessengerPlus does still bundle third party software, but instead of a trojan, they're now bundling the Ask.com rubbish. Because of this removal, I've now removed all of the following from the hpHosts blacklist;

download.msgplus.net
download.msgpluslive.net
files.msgplus.net
files.msgpluslive.net
mirror1.msgpluslive.net
mirror2.msgpluslive.net
mirror3.msgpluslive.net
mirror4.msgpluslive.net
mirror5.msgpluslive.net
mirror6.msgpluslive.net
mirror7.msgpluslive.net
msgplus-update.net
msgplus.com
msgplus.net
msgpluslive-update.net
msgpluslive.be
msgpluslive.cl
msgpluslive.co.uk
msgpluslive.com
msgpluslive.com.pt
msgpluslive.com.tw
msgpluslive.de
msgpluslive.dk
msgpluslive.ee
msgpluslive.es
msgpluslive.fr
msgpluslive.it
msgpluslive.net
msgpluslive.nl
software.msgpluslive.net
stats.msgplus-update.net
www.msgplus-update.net
www.msgplus.com
www.msgplus.net
www.msgpluslive-update.net
www.msgpluslive.be
www.msgpluslive.cl
www.msgpluslive.co.uk
www.msgpluslive.com
www.msgpluslive.com.pt
www.msgpluslive.com.tw
www.msgpluslive.de
www.msgpluslive.dk
www.msgpluslive.ee
www.msgpluslive.es
www.msgpluslive.fr
www.msgpluslive.it
www.msgpluslive.net
www.msgpluslive.nl


For reference regarding MessengerPlus;

http://forums.malwarebytes.org/index.php?showtopic=57081

It's worth noting, they actually removed it a few months ago - for those with a newer version of Windows, or those with WLM (Windows Live Messenger (aka MSN Messenger)) already installed, but Swizzor was still installed if you didn't already have MSN (aka on a brand new install of XP - an OS that a very large proportion of people are still using, and indeed, still prefer to use).

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

A step in the right direction for MessengerPlus. My question is (impossible to answer) how many shady download sites out there will still have the old download which includes the trojan in MessengerPlus? This is a solid example of why so many of us repeat over and over to ALWAYS download either from the authors website or a well known good DL site like MajorGeeks. Thanks for the update Steve!