Winprotector is not an antispyware program. It doesn’t protect your computer. It doesn’t clean up spyware or anything else. It’s a fraudware program known as a corrupt security tool. It pretends to be a helpful program, but isn’t it funny just how hard their sales technique is? This is Internet terrorism, and you’re the potential victim.
Corrupt security tools such as this one are rampant on the Internet. They lurk on infected websites and in corrupt downloads, waiting for an unsuspecting user to cross their path. Unfortunately, there isn’t much that anyone can do to tell these fake websites and downloads from real ones until it’s too late.
A user’s only hope against this threat is to have a good antivirus tool already installed on their computer. If you find yourself on an infected website or downloading an infection, then your antispyware software isn’t good enough. Find something better.
The websites mostly promise pornography, gambling, or shady prescription drug deals. I won’t set myself up as anyone’s moral compass, especially since this is no gauge for what an infected site is. There may be other, less frequently used formats for infected sites.
This is especially considering that every corrupt security tool has a home page where you can get infected. While some people may wag their fingers at a person for getting infected at a porn site, they themselves may get the same infection looking for an antispyware program.
The downloading means of transmission is possibly easier to avoid. Most of the time, infections are transmitted through downloads of illegally pirated material. This often happens at peer to peer (P2P) file sharing sites.
Internet piracy is not in any way a practice I condone. Aside from the risk of getting arrested by the FBI for downloading a movie before it’s released, it has always had other risks. Remember, corruption breeds corruption. Pirated downloads have always carried the risk of infection by Viruses, Worms, Trojans, and now corrupt security tools. A free movie or copy of Windows is not worth the risks inherent in Internet piracy.
How do these things work, anyway? First, when a user clicks an infected button, a pop-up “warning screen” appears and says that the computer is infected. It may even show a high speed scan counting so-called “infected files.”
These are actually your temporary files. They’re nothing malignant; they’re files that store your browsing history. Of course, by the time a user gets infected, they will usually have already collected a large number of temp files, so it’s always going to look nasty.
The next thing it does is that it tells you that you need to download the registered or full version of the program to clean this infection. First of all, your Windows program is already equipped to delete your temporary files, free of charge. However, you are actually infected now, and do need a real antispyware tool to clean it up…just not this one.
