I was trying to download OpenOffice from the cnet download site and Avast! flagged a warning that this site is malicious, so I didn’t download. I had always believed cnet to be very safe, and have used it in the past safely. Though I noted that “mmm.freedownloadzone.com/images” not “www.download.cnet.com” (changed www to mmm for forum safety) was what is showing in my Avast! Network shield as infected.
I have tried cnet.co.uk downloads instead of cnet.com but too scared to try download now lol. It comes up openoffice.virginmedia not openoffice.org, if I want to download Open office…Puzzled!!!
Where can I download “open office” safely? And was my earlier Avast! warning a false positive?
Many thanks in advance for any help I am given, by you knowledgeable guys!
But it was while I was on downloads.com (cnet) that I got the malicious site warning from Avast!, with reference to vvv.freedownloadzone.com/images… How can that be? If cnet is considered a clean site?
Depending on whether you include the www or not and how you spell some of the sites exactly, you may actually get a redirect to a malicious website instead of the site you are really interested in. Malware sites try to take advantage of minor spelling and syntax errors. One thing you can do to make things a little safer is to use a DNS like OpenDNS or GoogleDNS that tries to check for these types of malicious sites and block them.
