PSA: That 'free' PDF editor I downloaded last month secretly installed adware

I downloaded a PDF editor from some random site because I didn't want to pay $15 a month for Adobe. Worked fine for two weeks then my browser started showing these weird pop ups every time I opened it. Turns out it was injecting ads into my Chrome tabs, pretty sneaky. I ran Malwarebytes and it found like 12 threats hiding in my system files. Cost me an hour to clean everything up, not worth the hassle. Has anyone else had a free tool turn out to be junk like this?

3 comments

3 Comments

shanef341mo ago

Back in 2019 I downloaded a "free" video converter called Movavi something and it changed my default search engine to Yahoo without asking. Took me three days to realize why all my Google searches looked different. I ended up having to reset my browser settings completely and it still popped back up a week later. Did you check if that PDF editor left any scheduled tasks behind?

drewr151mo ago

Yeah that's how nearly every free "tool" works now. They just quietly hook into your system hoping you never notice.

emeryj661mo ago

Hang on a minute - are we sure it wasn't just a bad batch of downloads? I've grabbed a few free PDF editors over the years from places like Softpedia and never had anything worse than a toolbar that took 10 seconds to uncheck during install. Malwarebytes can be pretty aggressive too. Last time I ran it on my own machine it flagged a perfectly legit driver as a threat just because it had a weird filename. Maybe check if those 12 threats are actually real or if it's false positives. The pop ups sound annoying for sure but an hour of cleanup seems steep unless you were already pretty deep into system files.