Computer Act!ve - UK (2022-04-27)

Named & Shamed

SOFTWARE WARNING!

21

WHAT ARE THEY BARRY’S VILLAIN OF THE FORTNIGHT

TALKING ABOUT?

Issue 630 • 27 April – 10 May 2022

Google scammer Gavin Dalglish

Click this and you’ll get Opera, Skype and more Trojans than The Iliad

Barry Collins puts the boot into tech villains, jargon-

spouting companies and software trying to trick you

Don’t get Snappy Driver from Sdi-tool.org

H

ere’s a cautionary tale

from reader David

Noble, who told us

how he was caught out after

installing Snappy Driver, as we suggested

in Issue 627’s ‘Stop Using Rubbish

Software’ Cover Feature.

He admits he didn’t quite follow our

advice to the letter. Instead of using the

snipca link we provided (www.snipca.

com/41002) to safely download the

software from the developer’s site,

David searched for the program on

Google. That might sound sensible

enough, but the site at the top of the

search results (https://sdi-tool.org) is

blatantly using the software’s good

name to download junk on to PCs.

Clicking the yellowy-orange Download

button (pictured) not only smuggles in

the Opera browser and Skype without

warning, but a subsequent scan from

Malwarebytes revealed no fewer than 14

Trojans (that’s more than in The Iliad).

If David had scrolled further down the

page, he might have seen the Russian

language text and run a mileski. Instead,

he clicked the big download buttons at

the top. When we tried to follow in

his footsteps in Windows 11, the Edge

browser blocked the download, warning

it was unsafe.

Even after we clicked through the

warnings (on a safe virtual machine),

Windows 11 wouldn’t let us run the

downloaded software, warning it was a

virus. David was using an older version

of Windows, which doesn’t have these

safety nets.

Microsoft takes a lot of stick in this

column, but it’s done a top job here.

But Google: you can see me after school.

The moral of the tale for readers,

meanwhile, is to only download from

our snipca links (and to follow our

Snappy Driver Workshop on page 38).

Oh, and please keeptelling us when

you spot wrong ‘uns.

It’s not only dodgy software sites that

want to be top of the Google search

results (see above), it’s legitimate

companies too. Such prominence can

make or break a business. This partly

explains how Gavin Dalglish managed

to dupe charities, community groups

and small businesses into thinking he

was a Google executive who could get

them to the top of the search charts.

Over a period of eight years,

Dalglish, 38, swindled more than half

a million pounds out of his victims,

spending his ill-gotten gains

on luxury travel, gambling and

cocaine, according to the Sidmouth

Herald, which actually employed

Dalglish for a while in its advertising

department.

His Google scam cost one

77-year-old victim his home, forcing

him to cash in pensions to buy a

smaller house. Dalglish is now living

in more modest accommodation as

well, having been sentenced to five

years in prison at Exeter Crown Court.

WHAT THEY SAY

Mozilla http://www.snipca.com/41511 “HTML

and CSS offer semantic transparency,

providing the browser with a model of

the presentation which can be modified

or reinterpreted. Web standards

give the browser wide discretion to

operate, and the loose coupling of Web

Platform features and their uneven and

incremental deployment discourages

sites from making hard assumptions

about the final result.”

WHAT THEY MEAN

All browsers are fab, but use Firefox.