They did not infect machines; they just popped up that it found all kinds of things that were not there at all and you should upgrade to fix the issue. That is also a rancid tactic but I think Norton (or Mcafee?) also did it (it has been a long time but I remember either or both of them trying to panic users into buying like that). After upgrading, it would scan and nothing would be found; or at least not what it said before upgrading.

Never understood how they survived that. Now they seem to be dominating their country's tech landscape. Market ended up rewarding sociopathic behavior. Pretty terrible.

I remember something similar but it wasn't infecting them it was just giving false positives and constantly popping up to upgrade. I can't remember which software it was, it may have been avast.

I have never heard this. Can you provide a link with more details?

Sounds fascinating. Please tell us more.

This. I lost a lot of respect when Firefox complained that something was wrong, and it turned out to be Avast doing a man in the middle attack to 'protect' me on https websites.

ironically it injects crap into your computer so that you cannot uninstall it fully, to prevent people from renewing the free trial.

Yeah, on Mac/Windows, I just install the free version of Malwarebytes and do a full scan occasionally...

It wasn't only in polish. We had this in French too. "La base virale VPS a été mise a jour" https://youtu.be/PMro9K5EM0s

I grew up in Eastern Europe and moved to Western Europe in my early 20s and the difference is that in the East, STEM was very popular for kids in high school and university as it offered access to engineering careers which were the most lucrative considering how poor the economy was in the 90s, helping kids of lower class background move upwards(just like in the US) and it would also open doors later in life to emigrate to the West.

Now in Western Europe, due to socialism and high standard of living, kids aren't that poor and tech salaries are not that much higher than any other desk job so they have no interest to study STEM as it's seen as stressful career path for boring lonely nerds and instead prefer to focus on social sciences, being wantrepreneurs or Instagram influencers.

As another Czech person and former PM of another security product I guess there are two main factors in play:

1. Tech factor: amount of HW and SW what could be exported into Eastern bloc was very limited so people who worked with computers were all very confortable with low level work as getting anything else than bare computer was almost impossible.

2. Business factor: there was close to 0 money available in Easter bloc (= 40 years of comunism destroyed all personal equity as all property from previous generation was confiscated and your earning potential was very limited) so when you started software company you needed sales channel that didn't require much hand holding. Antiviruses are great because you could use listings on download sites and the product is culture agnostic.

In US your best bet in 90s was to create consumer or enterprise SW company. But imagine being in Czech republic: you don't understand the US culture to get into home of people and you don't have access to capital and institutional knowledge to build enterprise SW (no way you was going to afford opening US office on money availale in this region). But hey, no problem writing AV software, then upload it to download.com and then collect payments.

Also those AV companies took so long to take off: Avast was created in late 80s and it took them around 15 years to get any traction. Being in region with more opportunities you probably give up and try something else.

It could be also that a lot of white-collar and intellectual cybercriminals are located in those countries.

No, it’s a completely different codebase now.

No wonder windows defender is such low quality.

Who bought Romanian antivirus company.