Do your research

Another day, another company failed in trying to make me buy their product and I ain’t surprised no more. It was pretty clever. What happened is that they link to your WordPress installation and this causes a traceback to happen.

Now, typically linking to your is a good thing but in this case, the company trying to sell the product is now displaying its link within my WordPress Admin CP.

Now, being the type of person I am, I clicked on the link and it took me to a “YOUR COMPUTER HAS VIRUSES” page and not even for a second did I know it was true. On that page, it did an “online scan” and it was showing my C: Drive and D: Drive and scanning the DDL files within my “Windows” folder.

Now, I am pretty sure that some people will go – Oh no, I have viruses but this company will let me remove them. If they did some research, they would have known I was a useless person to aim their product at. My user string for my web browser is

“Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.1.16) Gecko/20080703 Mandriva/2.0.0.16-1.1mdv2008.0 (2008.0) Firefox/2.0.0.16”

Now, let’s just break it down to the part we care about. “Linux i686” and “Mandriva/2.0.0.16-1.1mdv2008.0”. A quick second PHP script would have noticed that I am using Linux and forwarded me to either a “Linux Anti-Virus” or just send that it doesn’t work on my operating system.

So, if you are a company planning on doing this, at least do your research into other operating systems first.