Instant buzz and spywares.
On one of the mails my friend recieved yesterday from a person who is supposed to be one of the "Adsense gurus", whom she had subscribed to out of curiosity, a program called Instant Buzz was suggested as a great tool to drive traffic to your website. Now coming from a source like that any unsuspecting user would have just gone to the Instant buzz site and installed the suggested tool bar which is absolutely free.
Going to the site you will see some catchy words and that would entice an unsuspecting user into downloading it and installing it on your PC.
The kind of offers it was making along with the "free" tag made me wonder how this guys are making money out of it and that too with the claimed full support team that they have.
I have written about spywares/adwares only recently and it did not take much time for me to realise this program could be yet another one that fits into that category. And to confirm my suspicion all I had to do was to Google the words "instant buzz" + spyware (this is just one of the ways one must confirm before installing any program that looks supicious, especially the ones that installs tool bars) and there was a plethora of related results with people talking about how it has affected them badly after installing it.
The pestpatrol report confirmed that this program Silently connects to an unintended location to transmit User Data. And it connects to a server every time that a new browser opens even if it's closed in the previous window.
In the scam.com forum about Instant buzz users were even talking about how hard it was to unistall the program.
The bottom line is never ever install programs that are all decked up with all these promises that are hard to digest. Always be cautious and do your own little research no matter who suggests it.
Scam.com is an ideal place for everyone to check out all the scams and stuff. You can find different categories there like Charity Scams, Corporate Scams, Internet scams etc:-
Also one must definitely check out the Spywarewarrior.com site that has a detailed list about all the rogue/suspect Anti-Spyware Products & Web Sites and other Anti-spyware resources.
Also check out the article I wrote about Spywares and Anti-spywares.