Most of you including me had loved Zonealarm for providing a excellent firewall for FREE. This love is gone today when the Free users were greeted or you can say scared by this Popup about ZeuS.Zbot.aoaq.
The popup talks about ZeuS.Zbot.aoaq which is a new variant of a financial Trojan virus that steals banking passwords and financial account data, resulting in unauthorized money transfers and you need to buy the Pro version to get protected instead of the FREE one.
Even the threat type may be real, but the way Zonealarm is using the popup to scare users and make them buy the Pro version puts them in the league of those guys who use different means or scarewares to steal your money.
When you click on threat details or get protection, you are directed to a Zone Alarm page asking you to buy it.
This small but bad ploy will make many users like me to uninstall Zonealarm products from their systems instead of buying the Pro version. If you got a decent antivirus whether free or paid, you are protected and hence you should not be buying it.
Here’s a small tutorial about Zeus kind of trojans.
Zeus.Zbot.Aoaq: A Hoax – How To Remove The Real Virus
Thanks Sujay for mentioning this ZA dirty trick.
More discussions about this can be found here.
- Dirty Marketting Tactics by ZoneAlerm
- zbot.zeus Notice – ZoneAlarm User Community
- Zone Alarm “Marketing Trick” .. Is it the right way? – Wilders Security Forums
What you guys think about it? Leave your opinion in comments.
Nasty trick. an esteemed company like Zone Alarm shouldnt do such things. I read a comment on the WOT page of Zone Alarm where a user has mentioned this scary trickThanks Sujay for the info and Avi for sharing it with the readers
A respected and trusted company such as ZA should never have done this. This will bring more bad name than few pennies.
Dirty tricks indeed!
Haven’t tried their protection before until they had the giveaway last year online.
In many years I’ve heard only good things of this vendor to be one of the most reliable on market.
In my case I lost my own trust after seen the GUI in their firewall which doesn’t looks improved to meet the modern needs for what users are used to in these days.
And I became even more disappointed after their e-mail arrived were they explained that my subscription should be renewed in two weeks if not change the auto renew function inside my account for not being charged for a new license. So that was their trick by ask for peoples credit cards when signed up.
Looks like the same tactic or very similar what’s dateingsites are using in charge users.
This shouldn’t be allowed online
Looks very close a hoax rogue software to me.
Or is this ment by ZA to be joke?
If it was a joke which obviously is not, will cost ZoneAlarm its reputation.
Horribly bad marketing decision-any idea who the brain trust is behind this debacle?
No clue on the brain behind all this. 🙂