Tuesday, July 21, 2009

Rogue or Real A-Squared Marketeer?

It was reported at Malwarebytes Forum that someone claiming to be a representative of A-Squared Anti-Malware has been sending messages to helpers on forums requesting that they drop Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware (MBAM) and use A-Squared instead.

Although the review, "a-squared Anti-Malware 4.0 - Alarming False Positives" by PC Magazine is for version 4.0 and not the current 4.5, perhaps the person thinks what s/he is doing will help overcome the negative aspects presented in that review. After reading what this person is spreading, it is difficult not to think that the false/positive detection of MBAM was intentional. (See this July 3, 2009, report at WOT, Todays ASquared F/P's.)

The truth of the matter is that on the forums we recommend the software program that does the necessary work to remove malware. It is for that precise reason that so many of the forum security experts recommend MBAM. I certainly have seen successful results in logs when recommending MBAM and will continue recommending Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware.

I sincerely hope that this is a "rogue marketeer" and not a true representative of A-Squared and that A-Squared representatives extend an appropriate public apology.

Update posted by Fabian Wosar, (Technical Support) at a-squared forum:
"Mike Christenson, the person responsible for the PM you quoted, is no longer part of Emsi Software GmbH. He was fired today (actually yesterday) as soon as we became aware of the mails and PMs he was sending out.

I can't say anything more official yet as all people who could give a more official statement right now are not available. You will have to wait until it's day in Austria/Germany (it's 02:40 AM right now)."
and confirmed by Marcin Kleczynski (Malwarebytes President and CEO):
"I spoke with the CEO of Emsisoft regarding this situation. Christian confirmed it was an employee of Emsisoft and he has dealt with him properly. I thank Christian for his efforts."




Remember - "A day without laughter is a day wasted."
May the wind sing to you and the sun rise in your heart...

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Greetings Corrine :) . I'm exile360 (MBAM forum regular and MRU freshman). Good article. It's been updated on the MBAM forum, apparently it was indeed a rogue marketeer and EMSI is going to deal with them. I'm not sure about the public apology though, hopefully that'll come. I just wanted to point out that your link to WOT goes to the homepage, not the actual report of the FP's on the part of ASquared which is located here: http://www.mywot.com/en/forum/3861-todays-asquared-f-p-s

Corrine said...

Hi, exile360.

Thank you for the correction on the WOT link. I updated the post with the correct link.