Every now and then I check comments stuck in the spam filter of my blog. Mostly I find spam postings advertising fake brand merchandise, with the odd bit of SEO spam thrown in. Today I found a link to a site selling a product called “Free Audio Editor 2014” (free-audio-editor dot com), which as it turns out is also available at download.cnet.com. Why would a free product be advertised via blog spams, I wondered. What would they gain?

So I downloaded a copy and uploaded it to virustotal.com for checking for malware. As it turns out 11 out of 57 products that analysed it didn’t like it:

AVware InstallCore (fs) 20150307
Avira Adware/InstallCore.A.367 20150307
Baidu-International Adware.Win32.InstallCore.XA 20150306
Comodo Application.Win32.InstallCore.AEK 20150306
DrWeb Trojan.InstallCore.151 20150306
ESET-NOD32 a variant of Win32/InstallCore.XA potentially unwanted 20150307
K7AntiVirus Unwanted-Program ( 004a9d5f1 ) 20150306
K7GW Unwanted-Program ( 004a9d5f1 ) 20150306
Norman InstallCore.CERT 20150306
VBA32 Malware-Cryptor.InstallCore.gen 20150306
VIPRE InstallCore (fs) 20150307


The results suggest that this product may be adware.

I would never install software on my PC that was advertised via spam. If you’re looking for a free audio file editor, I recommend Audacity (http://audacity.sourceforge.net/), which is open source and works great.