Cnet's Download.com is bundling malware with Nmap

David Heath
Tuesday, 06 December 2011 12:03

Business IT - Security

Fyodor (Nmap's original author) is an angry man right now.  The download.com website has added a wrapper to Nmap and other downloads to install various additional components; the wrapper is also recognized as malware by many AV packages.

According to the summary Fyodor has written, "C|Net's Download.Com site has started wrapping their Nmap downloads (as well as other free software like VLC) in a trojan installer which does things like installing a sketchy "StartNow" toolbar, changing the user's default search engine to Microsoft Bing, and changing their home page to Microsoft's MSN."

Hardly the actions of a trusted source of free and shareware software.

Fyodor continues, referring to a screen image of the Nmap download page on download.com, "Note how they use our registered 'Nmap' trademark in big letters right above the malware 'special offer' as if we somehow endorsed or allowed this.  Of course they also violated our trademark by claiming this download is an Nmap installer when we have nothing to do with the proprietary trojan installer.

"In addition to the deception and trademark violation, and potential violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, this clearly violates Nmap's copyright.  This is exactly why Nmap isn't under the plain GPL. Our license specifically adds a clause forbidding software which 'integrates/includes/aggregates Nmap into a proprietary executable installer' unless that software itself conforms to various GPL requirements (this proprietary C|Net download.com software and the toolbar don't).  We've long known that malicious parties might try to distribute a trojan Nmap installer, but we never thought it would be C|Net's Download.com, which is owned by CBS!  And we never thought Microsoft would be sponsoring this activity!"

Read on to see what the AV vendors think of this.