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.

What you guys think about it? Leave your opinion in comments.