Yesterday IObit has released first beta of it flag ship product Advanced SystemCare 6, to see what new features it offers we’ve installed it on our Computer to our surprise it installed “Advanced SystemCare Surfing Protection” extension for Firefox, Chrome and Internet Explorer browsers that too without our permission, and they’ve not mentioned about the add-on during the setup, that is really annoying and bad on part of IObit even though it is beta there should at least a checkbox on the install wizard during the setup that lets user opt-out of it.
ASC6 installs Advanced SystemCare Surfing Protection add-on and toolbar
AFAIK IObit not installed any extensions in their ASC v5 series but if you install beta 1 of ASC 6 it will install the add-ons which claims to “protect your Computer from malicious website attack”, this add-on adds its icon in the address bar of browser and shows site safety rating for the page or site you’re on and it shows these icons in search results of Google and Bing Similar to WOT and Avast Webrep. if you hover over the icon on address bar or for any search result it shows “the site is safe” message for a safe site.
It’s a surprise that Firefox 14.0.1 not prompted us with a dialog to allow or cancel the install of this add-on, generally Firefox lets the user know about third-party add-on install with a dialog and extension will only be installed unless if permitted by the user, that’s not the case here, something for Mozilla to look into in future to stop these add-ons from automatically installing without showing opt-in dialog.
For IE8, ASC6 installed Advanced SystemCare surfing Protection (add-on) toolbar and BHO of Advanced SystemCare browser Protection. Thank god it not modified the search settings and homepage for any of installed browser.
What do think of all this stuff from IObit? share with us in comments.
The fact that Firefox doesn’t detect the extension being installed would indicate that IOBit have intentionally tried to circumvent this security feature.
I too thought the same.
I personally liked how asc4 didn’t put anything on your computer if you didn’t want it. ASC5 inserts itself into you’re startup even if you don’t install it. I work at a computer store and we use it to help get bogged down systems back up and running and I have to always go in and manually uncheck the option in the start up config. I’m beginning to not like ASC as much now that they do even more stuff without asking.
They have a long history of such practices.
We know that, we’ve covered it on this blog also,https://techdows.com/2009/11/malwarebytes-iobit-security-360-is-rip.html