Giveawayoftheday security concerns

I have been having an issue recently where GAOTD will not post comments about programs that have negative ratings on multiple sites. Today's giveaway is Streaming Video Recorder 2.0.7. The main website that sells Streaming Video Recorder is www.recordstreamingvideo.net. That site shows up red on WOT, SiteAdvisor and Norton Safe Web. I made a post about that (with links specific to the rating pages of the program) but they would not post. So I just made the comment that the program shows up with red ratings on all three sites and GAOTD would not allow that to be put in the comments section. There is currently one comment about the program showing up red on SA but that's it.

Has anyone else been having this issue with GAOTD? This is supposed to be their big giveaway month where they repost the biggest "hits" of 2009.

 

I have not had a problem with this.

 

I know some people were posting on the comments page above the comments in the suggestions for developer box and then complaining in the forum about their posts not showing up on GAOTD. but if your sure you didn't post in this section and you did post at the bottom then I don't know whats going on. I've never had a problem with posting though.
Also I found 3 posts about ratings by WOT and Site Advisor so u might check to make sure you were posting in the right place.
Hope this helps you

 

I noticed the WOT warning but there were no comments to back up the claims. Their software is available for download on download.com, don't they check before hosting?

 

Well it looks like something similar is going on again. Today's free offer is Aiseesoft Total Video Converter. Aiseesoft is listed on hpHosts as a phishing site. Also comments on WOT and SiteAdvisor indicate that Aiseesoft has spam bots that spam forums with ads of their products. Today's download offer also apparently includes "Software Informer" which could be considered spyware, and tries to install itself several times throughout the install process. The current ratings of Aiseesoft on GAOTD for today's give away is 461 positive and 63 negatives. This is only 3.5 hours into the giveaway and some of the most popular give aways in the past have not totaled 400+ positives in 24 hours.

I made a post in regard today's give away and the hpHost, WOT and SA reports. Of course, that post has not been approved and I doubt it is.

 

Earlier when I tried to go to the site Aiseesoft to download Aiseesoft Total Video Converter Asquare blocked the site as a Malware site,I had to allow it to download.

 

http://www.urlvoid.com/
gives mostly ok ratings, except for HP hosts and WOT....2/17 detections rated suspicious, and F-Secure says "safe"
https://browsingprotectionbeta.f-se...tB6g8U*sUNDdE*VL96saSoOn6X8R8taRppsnxhdh07lNG

But if there's any doubts, then perhaps it's not worth risking...better safe than sorry. Not good if GOTD are omitting negative comments, but then again all free downloads(of this kind) should be approached with caution imho.

 

Today's offering (Aiseesoft) didn't do anything remotely suspicious during a carefully monitored install.
I have to say it's a mighty fine application too.

 

Apparently it is pretty popular too. 958 positive votes to only 96 negative ones. And 29 generally beaming comments about the software. This video converter is on pace to have some 3,000+ positive ratings today. Would that be an all time record on GAOTD?

Seriously, this is just pure crap. There are over 1,000 votes yet only 29 comments? Look at the other software give aways of the recent past on GAOTD. There should easily be 70-100 comments about this software by now with the number of votes. This video converter is going to have more positive votes than the DAEMON Tools Pro Standard a couple weeks back. It had 1776 positives and 274 negatives for a 87% positive rating. There were also 140 comments. Aieesoft is running at a 91% positive clip.

I can see where Aieesoft can spam the votes on GAOTD. The last 4 times I have checked the votes there has been an increase of exactly 20 positive votes. But for GAOTD to not include negative comments about Aieesoft is pretty bad. There are a few negative comments listed, but there's no telling how many have been excluded- I know mine was. And I mentioned the hpHost listing.

 

GAOTD is known to be a "trustable" looking way to spread malware and the like.
You should never trust anything you get from GAOTD.

 

Funny how URLVoid gives www.giveawayoftheday.com a completely clean bill of health.Do you have any evidence of where they've knowingly spread malware?

 

I have checked GAOTD pretty much every day for the past 3-4 years. I am aware of at least a half dozen times a year or so that there are legit complaints about downloads containing malware, usually a trojan. I don't know if GAOTD knows about these infections but I doubt they check very closely before putting them on their site for download.

Just look at what's going on today. If you had visited GAOTD very often you would realize that 1500+ positive votes in less than 12 hours is pretty amazing and is usually reserved only for the very best promotions- not some run of the mill video converter. I have made a post about the hpHosts listing which was not allowed to be published. Coincidentally I also tried to make a post in the GAOTD forum but for some reason my password would not work. I asked for a new password and it would not work either. I then made a new account from a different computer and viola!, I was able to make a post in the GAOTD forum and in the product reviews (pending review by a mod). They will probably both be deleted soon as I mentioned the hpHosts listing as well as the rigged voting.

Current stats, 11 hours 20 minutes into the give away: 29 comments, 1522 positive votes, 132 negative votes.

 

VirusTotal is another good resource, but watch out for false positives.
Anubis is another but much more advanced option.

Personally I only use GAOTD software if I can't find a freeware that does the same thing.

 

I know that GAOTD promotes many rogue and not so good products.
But I doubt that any of the products are malware infected, it is mostly false positives or bundled products which have opt outs.

Many users don't read everything on the installer and end up installing the bundled products.

Also be aware to not completely trust hpHosts. Any users that has an issue with bundled products getting installed, can report it to hpHosts and they will add that site, if the site ever goes legit, they don't remove it.

Many rogue sites will change their domains and new legit site come along and take over the old domains. The new legit site still will be listed in both hpHosts and WOT.

I have used HostsMan for many years, I removed all of hpHosts listings and now use MVPS Hosts.

I got tried of hpHosts listing too many legit sites as malware related or rogue.

MVPS Hosts has much less false positives than hpHosts and they remove old listings when domains change.

For audio and video tools, you can find just about any freeware today that will be just as good or better than the paid products.

Thanks.

 

I've been visiting GAOTD for a long time too.While the giveaways are often pretty useless there are top quality products by the likes of Paragon offered too.I can't recall there being anything actually malicious offered,possibly a few ad/junkware-supported items have slipped through the net,as Littlebits said.

As for the voting anomalies,today the ratings are a bit odd but I've no idea about that or for what purpose rigging the ratings would be
All I can say is the video converter offered today exhibits no suspicious behaviour whatsoever,on the contrary it just creates a self-contained,portable programme folder.No addons or strange outbound requests.I was needing to convert some HD flv files to Divx and this was a breeze to use with great results.

As with anything downloaded though extra vigilance never trashed anyone's system.It's good to keep a suspicious mind.

 

GAOD is rubbish. More than 95% of software offered here is pretty useless.

 

Yep it even coverts some .flvs files that crashed WinX HD Video Converter Deluxe, I am definitely keeping this .

 

how do you know this any facts?

 

Facts are in the history,
just take a look at was has been offered,
some shady formerly known spyware,
and some crap movie converters while
you get the best for free at http://forum.doom9.org/forumdisplay.php?f=78

I say, If you pay for a media converter, you still have a lot to learn in this life.