180solutions Tries to Clean Up its Act
On Tuesday, 180solutions announced it was ending the distribution of 180search Assistant and releasing Seekmo Search Assistant instead, which it says includes technologies to help reduce the number of unauthorized installations.
Ok ... let's see what this Seekmo Search Assistant has to offer ...
Apparently not starting out too good ...
Well let's install it and see what happens ... Seekmo makes three connections before the user is presented with the EULA?
Seems to me like it should be the other way around? ... continuing on with
the install ...
Oh my what's this? Seekmo is installing a system wide Windows Hook (WH_Shell).
This is the same result I saw earlier from from a Zango install.
Microsoft:
About Hooks - "Hooks tend to slow down the system because they
increase the amount of processing the system must perform for each message.
You should install a hook only when necessary, and remove it as soon as
possible".
The next prompt is that Seekmo is hooking into OneCare and every other application that starts.
... all this for a Search Assistant? ...
Ok let's run a couple of scans and see what we find ... (no action taken)
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| Microsoft | Ad-aware | SpyBot | Ewido | ZoneAlarm |
Well I'll go sign into my Hotmail account and check for messages ... oh no! ... not again!
Right in the middle of signing in I start getting pop-ups ... now this just
isn't right!
180Solutions
Privacy Policy states:
Search Assistant Software. By installing the Search Assistant Software,
you grant permission for 180 to periodically collect certain information
(key words, including portions of website addresses or URL's, from the
websites you visit) and upload this information to our servers so that we
may display targeted websites to you while you are connected to the
Internet.
But do you have to do this in the middle of my e-mail account? You'd think they would have built a exclusion list for these situations to avoid the impropriety of invading ... oops ... "periodically collect certain information" now I can't say for sure what they are collecting, but this make me really nervous.
To show that Seekmo is aware of the location the user is in I copied the matching URLs from the IE History and browser cache. It's a little hard to pick out but you can see where I visited MSN, then signed into Hotmail.
Notice the pop-up in the middle of my Passport login? Yikes!
" you grant permission for 180 to periodically collect" I found this to be more than periodically ... more like almost every link that I clicked.
... or even changed changed functions in my Hotmail account.
The next prompt I got from Seekmo pop-up page "Azoogle"
(see above image - cache2.gif)
"Do you want to allow this page to paste information from your Clipboard?"
Hell NO! I do not want to allow that ... but you can not get out of
the prompt with out killing the page in Task Manager.
For a company that prides itself in their Privacy Policy, I have to wonder
why a user would ever get that prompt?
Well needless to say I closed everything and uninstalled Seekmo Search Assistant via Add Remove. However that hung even after waiting 10 minutes for any kind of a response. Notice that nothing was running in Task Manager and there is a dead blank in the Task Bar.
Thus forcing a reboot ... looks like the uninstaller needs more work.
After a reboot and scanning with Microsoft Anti-Spyware the results were
clean.
The above reflects my own personal opinion not that of Microsoft or any
of the other products mentioned.
Mike Burgess
"There's no place like 127.0.0.1"