@German users - anti-virus.de

This site came up in a google search and I can't find hardly any information on the net/

ht tp://www.anti-virus.de

 

I'd leave that one alone, it looks a bit fishy, sort of like WinAntivirus2006, or something along that line. It says that it detects 80,000 viruses, but that's probably the number of malwares it installs itself

 

According to LinkScanner Pro there are security issues with this site.

Gerard

 

I wasn't speaking of trying it I was just trying to find out more information.

 

if you subscribe and pay the 20€ you will get access to various freeware products (according to another user on another forum).

 

That site is part of a large scale 'scam' ring, offering paid access to software, but only allows access to download freeware tools. The access is year based and gets automatically renewed and recharged without asking the user.

There's a multitude of sites, with different professional looking layouts, sometimes appraising different tools (not limited to AV software) which all can be linked to the same ring.

Unfortunately what they do is legal, yet i would rate a company using this profit model as immoral. Pity that doesn't count in court.

The domain registrar has been involved both in the dialer (mainpean if anyone remembers that) and spam scene.

 

For those who didn't understand the mainpean reference:
Mainpean is a german dialer distributor/creator who was commonly associated with the so called german dialer-mafia. They had their high time a few years back (~2002-2003) until AntiVir included dialer detection and pretty much ruined their business. Apparently they had losses in the million euro range and tried to sue H+BEDV back then (the old name of Avira) in court, but failed. Not long after they were prohibited from distributing almost half a million unique dialers that didn't stick to the dialer regulation laws. There was a lot of media coverage about that back then.
Mainpeans lawyers were Günter Freiherr. v. Gravenreuth (born Günter Dörr) and Bernhard Syndikus who are pretty famous in german internet circles for their dubious activities in semi-legal areas since the 1980s. Syndikus was convicted guilty of assisting illegal activities a short while ago in a lawsuit about large scale copyright infringement (the infamous FTPwelt case, a warez server with 45.000 paying subscribers that was busted 2004)

Gravenreuth was found guilty of defalcating client money and forgery of documents in 60 cases in december 2006.

For the sake of completeness: http://www.gb64.com/game.php?id=9902&d=18&h=0

Other infamous clients include i.E. Mario "DialerKing" Dolzer, who has been involved in the distribution of malware such as dialers and trojans, massive domain grabbing and paysites such as the one mentioned in this thread, some targetted specifically at children. He also tried suing H+BEDV for flagging his trojans with Syndikus as his lawyer. Dolzer can legally be called "Dialer-Parasite" as stated in another lawsuit.

It's a bad bad world, baby.