Tuesday, November 15, 2011

Lavasoft: Innocent until proven guilty

 Lavasoft at one point was the most popular AntiSpyware program. It has been one of CNET's top downloads for a while but what is going on with the company now. Lets put some of the part articles and some of the recent articles together and get a glimpse of what is going on:

 Back in May 2011 (source) it was announced that Lavasoft has been acquired by Solaria Fund. Doing a quick Yahoo Search shows the top results of the fund were just news articles about acquiring Lavasoft. A few months later on that some blog article a comment appeared on the SecurityGarden blog saying:

 FYI: After the "secret" acquisition (which, by the way, everyone was told that nothing will change), they fired a whole bunch of people in two strokes, the second being in May 2011.

Two weeks ago (Week 32), the remaining 15 or so employees were told that the Swedish offices will close (the date is not yet as yet).

Lulu have a satellite office in Ukraine where the programming will be done; I guess their "marketing" (for want of a better word) will be driven from Canada.

The end of an era.

  Now a few weeks after being announced is was acquired by the fund it was found that Lavasoft was running under LuLu Software. Now LuLu Software has a bad reputation on WOT which has many reports of their registry cleaning software being a rouge. Now the president of LuLu Software is Eric Gareau which is the former president of Interactive Brands. Back in 2008 Interactive Brands was cybersquatting security vendor urls.

 The Register recently took a look at the contact address for Lavasoft and noticed it matched up with the register address for some InterActive Brand sites and connected with risk sites such according to some vendors such as McAfee which has this report they referenced (McAfee report)

  Now make of this as you wish. Some people may lose trust because of what the new heads of Lavasoft have done in the past. However Lavasoft has not done anything wrong yet since they have been acquired by LuLu Soft. Even though popular online download site MajorGeeks issued a waring saying they would not download it. In my opinion I think its still to early to tell. We will all just have to wait and see what is going on there and if they post a press release on the Lavasoft site. As they say in America innocent until proven guilty.

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