NOOW media player

[Linuxis]

It's odd. I didn't have any problems opening most videos with it. It's video search was wonderful and I added some of my favorite video sites to it's podcast list. To a certain degree, you can even use it as a browser. However your reviews worried me.

I didn't experience anything too suspicious, and I didn't see anything about installing any toolbars or such. I'm a little concerned as to what's going on. I wonder if I need to uninstall it too.

I searched online for Babylon Toolbar and I got many help requests to uninstall it.
So it's a rootkit? Malware or simply an annoyance that ruins daily computer use?

[MidnightCowboy]

Originally Posted by Linuxis

So it's a rootkit? Malware or simply an annoyance that ruins daily computer use?

This kind of situation is made worse by how some security software vendors classify their detections. A lot of these are "reputation" based which basically means if the program isn't in their database, it will trigger a warning. Most folks interpret this to be "malware" which is usually not the case. We see these reports in the main site comments all the time.

Added to these are heuristic detections which again are not direct "hits" of known malware, but merely indications that a program type, how it acts, where it installs to or how it's packed "might" by an indicator of possible malware activity.

Confused? You bet, me too, this is why I always check out new programs myself using VirusTotal and a right-click scan with Malwarebytes and HitmanPro before deciding if I want to go ahead with the installation.

Generally, toolbars are not malware because they are not designed to defraud (as in rogue AV's), steal your passwords or adversely affect your system files. Instead, most toolbars will be ad-related in some way. This might mean displaying ads with search results or feeding your browsing history to vendors to enable targeted advertising later on. In this respect they fall into the annoyance category, rather than anything that is truly harmful.

The simplest way I know of to prevent these things arriving on your desktop is to employ WinPatrol which always picks these things up and also a good third party firewall set to warn about all outgoing connection attempts. Even if the Ask toolbar for instance is declined during install by either ticking or unticking boxes as appropriate, it will still "dial out" to Ask.com given the chance to do so.

It's also worth remembering that with some software, even if you decline all the "extras" during install, if the program is set to update automatically (usually enabled by default) these will be almost guaranteed to arrive anyway at a later date.