Yesterday a friend asked me to publish my opinion about the Bleepingcomputer getting sued by Enigma Software Group. They got sued because of their claims about Spyhunter, though some forum post gets mentioned in BleepingComputer’s plea for donations.
BleepingComputer is old tech support forum that is maintained by Lawrence Abrams (aka Grinler) through a Limited Liability Company (LLC). It is a commercial website. The site has ads, donation button, might get commission for downloads or even for just listing them as “favorite” product. They might get money from paid computer support as well. I think they make money and I have no problem with that fact. However I am not really happy with the way they review software and how they understand “freedom of speech”.
I have read that Spyhunter “review”. It is based on several citations and not on personal experience or scientific data:
- A list of rogue products from ~ 2004 or so in different defunc forum. The “rogue” label was caused by the way software is distributed mostly. Personally, I can’t judge about current software by 10 year old reviews as lots of things get changed. Even Spybot S&D released new version since then, and there was no Malwarebytes;
- A translated from French review by Malekal, that targets “fake blogs” promoting Spyhunter and not Spyhunter itself. I respect deeply Malekal as malware researcher, but not as a reviewer of other software;
- Website ratings, some of them are based on 1 or 2.
The claims that Spyhunter is bad are based on the fact that it detects cookies as well (which are not a serious threat) and that there were cases when SH does not work or uninstall well, also the pricing. Well, guess what: ALL antimalware programs might brick system. Including Malwarebytes (there were some cases). ALL of them try to make money or get sold (like it happened with SuperAntiSpyware). Many of AV and AntiMalware solutions try to protect themselves from being uninstalled by other software and thus their regular uninstalls might cause some issues.
Thus the review boils down to these things:
1. Bleeping reviewers do not like other websites in the same (more or less) niche as they are and claim they are false, e.g. Grinler auto-slams other websites when spamming yahoo answers in the past. You wont see any different opinions in Bleepingcomputer forums as these are censored.
2. Bleepingcomputer dismiss other programs they do not promote as false or rogue. This haven’t stopped earning money from their ads in the website (I have seen advertisements for StopZilla and even Spyhunter in Bleepingcomputer website in the past). Thus Grinler has no qualms about earning money from bad products as long as he does not put their ads himself (though he has full control to blacklist other sites in Google Adsense).
Thus is BleepingComputer defending freedom of speech themselves? Definitely no, only when it is useful for their purposes. This is not about freedom of speech, this is about simple case of libel and monetary gain from my perspective. However, the court will show who is right and who is wrong in this discussion.
Oh, and to be fully transparent in this case, you might want to read our disclosure. Though it is not about products, but about bad practices.
Do you work for Enigma? Sure sounds like it!
You are obviously paid by Enigma!
I have been under contract with Enigma subsidiary for half a year 10 years ago (around 2006 or 2007). My duties were related to managing web programming and some sort of support at that point. Everything else is in disclosure. I get no monetary benefit from this post.