Be Careful Download.Com Distribute Adware & Viruses Through Downloads, I strongly recommend if you planned to download a software and the source of download is from download.com just stop it and look for another mirror of direct download of that software!
About one month ago i download a file from Download.com and few days ago i found out that my Facebook account start showing strange advertises on right top and left of Facebook page. that sounds suspicious so I double checked with my friend if Facebook add new advertise or not? after i understood these adds are not from Facebook , i got these advertises are injected to my browser pages. after Googling i found out it seems the files i downloaded 1 month ago was contain a virus.
DOWNLOAD.COM use its own downloader for downloading all files on your computer.The problem start from here that you can not download without Download.com downloader and the Downloader itself contain a silent virus that later will install these Ad-wares to your computer. I believe they activate these after one month that user don't become suspicious to download.com .
These Ad-wares was in form of browser Add-ons that already was installed on my Google Chrome, Firefox , Internet Explorer. In my case the Ad-ware was installed with this name: "Deals Plugin Extension". and in some cases it was saw with this name : "Coupon Companion Plugin".
for cleaning this adware from Chrome:
- Go to Extension section of Chrome and write the "extention ID" then navigate to following path and remove the directory with that specific ID.
Windows XP:
%USERPROFILE%\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\Extensions
Windows Vista/ Windows 7/ Windows 8:
%LOCALAPPDATA%\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\Extensions - Remove "updater21804.exe" from following paths:
C:/windows/system32/tasks
C:/users/[username]/appdata/local/updater21804/updater21804.exe
for cleaning from the Firefox & Internet Explorer also you can goto the extension section and disable this extension.
Download.Com is part of CNET.
related posts:
http://forums.cnet.com/7723-7598_102-568380/coupon-companion-adware/
https://productforums.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/chrome/0Ityy2YXKJY%5B1-25-true%5D