Beware of malicious tools in sheep’s clothing.

For over a year now I have been writing and bringing you tools that are Open Source, Cross Platform, inexpensive or just absolutely great for making the life of an IT professional easier and more productive. I have been able to bring you everything from Enterprise class solutions to tools that you can use on a thumb drive.

In fact today I was planning on writing about three tools that are portable and pretty powerful. That is until I started to launch one of them and my anti-virus software went crazy and threw up a warning message something to the effect of “Are you CRAZY… this is a hackers tool”. Now I am not sure I have ever seen an antivirus warn me about software containing hacking tools before. I am not even sure that it did but it certainly threw up some red flags and I scrapped all three tools from my review.

It bummed me out because I spent half the morning testing and writing about two of the three tools I had downloaded. I HATE wasting my time… I really, really HATE IT! In fact I would love to drag out the name of the company that makes the tools and blast here in my blog. There are two problems with that though, I am quite certain my editors would not like the idea too much. These days you can be held libel for breathing the wrong way especially when you have a lot of people reading about it, and we have quite a nice following here at “A Better Windows World”. Secondly (and I doubt it) it could have been a misinterpretation on the part of my antivirus software. I could have found a file in the zip that did not look right.

Either way it cost me time and left me with nothing to write today except a warning to beware of malicious tools in sheep’s clothing. Sometimes a good thing is nothing more than a trap. Which we fully expect from certain sources, if you are playing around with password sites, warez, torrents or such you know there is a risk (not that we would ever do such a thing that stuffs illegal). This brings me to my point that is the stuff usually experienced by our end users. Not usually what you find in a legitimate open source tool …not usually.
Well have a great Wednesday and I will return tomorrow with some more legitimate tools that can make your world… A Better Windows World!

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