WARNING: JUNK AHEAD

Junk offender: Easeus Todo Backup Free

At best, Chinese software firm Easeus is a junk offender. It’s currently exploiting users’ fears about Wannacry and Petya ransomware to plug its backup software ( www.snipca. com/24878, scroll down for the spiel), and then uses said software to ferry junk into PCS. Worse, it seems to be redirecting users to sites that may contain malware.

I’ve slammed Easeus before for peddling PUPS. A Yahoo search engine and the browser hijacker Bytefence were both bundled in the company’s installers (Named & Shamed, Issue 481). But that may be the least of its crimes. Reader Peter Comley wrote to us to say the Easeus site forcibly redirected him to a third-party site ( http://giftbundlestour. com) when he tried to download the installer for Todo Backup Free. Then when he ran the installer, his antivirus, Kaspersky, tried to block it.

At first I assumed that Peter had run into a phishing site posing as Easeus. I can’t get http://giftbundlestour.com to load at all, and it doesn’t sound like part of Easeus. So I did some digging, and found other Easeus users reporting they’d been redirected to dodgy domains such as ‘bundletoursconcept.com’, as well as the site Peter mentioned (here’s a discussion on Reddit: www.snipca. com/24875). According to company database Matchdeck, Easeus owns both these domains ( www.snipca. com/24876).

I installed Easeus Todo Backup Free to see if I, too, would be sent to a mysterious site – and I wasn’t. The installer still contains a PUP (now Opera, a perfectly good browser but a PUP in this context), and I had to give Easeus my email address and dodge a few upgrade traps. I wasn’t redirected, but other users have been – so be on your guard. In fact, stay away from Easeus. Its software is not worth the risk.