Someone is not doing their job in checking out advertisers at BING. Third-party download sites are allowed to advertise their junk-filled installers on Bing, including for Microsoft's Internet Explorer...

Susoni

********************************************************

Expert Reviews has discovered that Microsoft’s Bing search engine is displaying prominent links to download sites, offering bloatware-stuffed versions of free software, including its own Internet Explorer.

These download sites are getting into search pages by buying advertising based on the relevant keyword. As Bing displays advertising at the top of the page, these download sites appear higher up than the product’s official page, which could fool users into going to the wrong site. Once on one of these sites, users are prompted to download a custom installer, which also attempts to install additional software, including adware, ad-injectors and other potentially unwanted software.

This kind of behaviour falls into a grey area. Technically, it’s not malware as the software asks permission to install and doesn’t directly affect your computer, which is why security software rarely picks it up. However, that doesn’t mean that it’s not a problem.

For starters, the opt-out options aren’t easy to spot and it’s easy for users to click Next in a wizard and ‘allow’ additional software onto their PC. Secondly, this kind of additional software is bloatware, sucking up resources and disk space. Thirdly, ad injectors are not only annoying, shovelling adverts into every website that you look at, but they can also break websites and stop them rendering. Finally, there’s the risk of a security flaw being discovered later, as with Lenovo and Superfish.

During our testing, we found that one bit of ‘harmless’ software we downloaded opened up a new website that had a pop-up warning (above) us that our computer had a virus. Calling the number on the site, our test computer was soon remote controlled by scammers who demanded £89 to ‘clean’ our computer. It's exactly this sort of attack Microsoft has warned about in the past, including in a blog post in 2014.

^ Paint.NET, for example, gets its official download site at the top of Google (right), while Bing (left)displays two adverts to an unofficial website loaded with software you probably don't want

With this kind of dubious practice harming users, Google has taken a tough stance and is disabling sponsored links to websites that bundle unwanted software with free downloads. Sadly, Bing has yet to take this approach.

Bing's search results also have a sidebar on the right side of the screen that sometimes shows a link to software's official download sites, but these aren't always obvious or even present.
Dangerous links

We decided to find out just how bad the problem is on Bing. First, we went to Ninite.com to put together a list of our favourite bits of free, including Chrome, Firefox, Spotify and Paint.NET. We picked this site, as its own custom installers are guaranteed not to install toolbars or other junk bits of software.

Next, we searched for each application in Bing and noted down if the top download site was official or unofficial. If it was official but was in the ad box, i.e. the manufacturer has had to pay to be top of search results, we’ve noted that down, too. Next, if there was an unofficial download site, we downloaded the installer and took note of the extra software that we were asked to install. Finally, we downloaded the official installer directly from the manufacturer and did the same thing. You can see all of the full results in the table on page two of this article.

Six out of ten pieces of software were affected by unofficial sites locking out the top of Bing's search results. All of the six unofficial download sites provided installers that promoted additional, potentially unwanted software including adware, PC cleaning programs, security software and toolbars. By comparison, using the same search terms on Google yielded 10 official download sites.

^ An ironic piece of potentially unwanted software we found during our testing

None of the installers alone were detected as potentially unwanted, although once we began clicking accept on each of the offers, Kaspersky anti-virus threw up warnings that we were installing potentially unwanted software.

We also checked the official websites of each piece of software to see how much - and what type - of additional software the official installers offered to the users. These mostly consisted of toolbars and search engine switches to one of the major providers including Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask, although one official installer from Sourceforge contained Linkey, a piece of adware.