Malwarebytes Brand Exploited Through Search

[Jack]

It’s not often that I search for the term Malwarebytes on Google. I know how to get to my own company’s website by typing it into the address bar. However, when a friend or family member asks me how to get to our website, I almost always instruct them to search.

Unfortunately, there exists a market where bad people benefit by preying on our users. They create websites which advertise that they distribute Malwarebytes and instead, download a product of their own onto our user’s machine. They advertise on Google and turn up in search results. I’d equate this to a cereal company packaging their generic, less delicious brand into a Cheerios box and putting it on shelves.

If you see a page like this, it is fraudulent and you should go directly to www.malwarebytes.org instead.

It makes me sick, and I refuse to let it go on. Today, I instructed our legal team to pursue all of these cheaters in hopes that we can wipe them from the face of the Internet.

But that’s not all. How far is too far? Should advertisers on Google be allowed to use company names as keywords? If I search for Cheerios, should the first advertisement be for the generic brand? It’s allowed, a common practice, and in my opinion completely unethical.

Read more ..

 

[Jack]

Well , it's a know fact that cyber criminals use SEO techniques to rank higher in Google Search thus having a better chance of infecting computers but the main question here is why Google allows or in fact doesn't stop this behavior.
This sites have no real content apart from the keywords and are very new on the internet so it wouldn't be very hard to spot them and if they can't remove them from their search at lest they could put them in page '30'
I do agree with what the author said and yes they should take some legal actions because this is the only way Google and the other will learn and change.
Now , the users have also their share of blame , the poorly written description and text should be a sign of warning for any decent user.
At the end , I'm sure this page is no off and it manage to infect some security newbies.

 

[Tom172]

Unfortunately, it's an endless game of cat and mouse for Malwarebytes and other companies. This has been going on for a long time and isn't going to stop any time soon

Now, I'm off for a bowl of cheerios.

 

[jamescv7]

This isn't new and relatively basic kind of scam that until more users were victim.

I think Google must likely have the responsibility to monitor every sites especially like scam sites. So in order it would not appear in any search.