On March 24, 2010, lawyers representing the Cyberdefender Corporation issued a ‘take-down’ notice to Allen Harkleroad. The take-down notice claims that Allen published false and potentially defamatory articles about their product and sales practices.
The Contenders:
Cyberdefender is advertised as an easy solution for PCs that are running slow or are infected with spyware or adware. You may have seen the television advertisements for MyCleanPC.com and DoubleMySpeed.com. Visits to both of those websites will prompt you to install Cyberdefender software. It looks like Cyberdefender is the owner of both of those sites.
Allen Harkleroad is a well known consumer advocate, who has taken on some pretty big names in business, such as Dell, AMD, ATI, UPS and FedEx, to name a few.
The Contention:
Allen claims that Cyberdefender is a scam and has posted several articles in his websites, supporting those claims. Here’s one of them:
Beware of MyCleanPC.com and DoubleMySpeed.com Same Scam, Same Company
Here is a copy of the legal take-down notice from Cyberdefender’s lawyers:
At one point, Allen says that he:
I installed the MyCleanPC software on a fully patched Windows XP machine that I rarely used just to see what happen. Other than installing software I use nothing else had been installed and no software had been uninstalled on the machine. It does have anti virus software on it. The CyberDefender software found over 3,000errors on a machine that runs perfectly fine, never had software uninstalled and rarely was on the Internet.
I’ve heard others claim that Cyberdefender isn’t worth the asking price. I decided to try it myself. I used Microsoft Virtual PC, with a copy of the IE6 test virtual machine. This allows me to run a clean, new, fully patched copy of Windows XP. It doesn’t have anything installed on it, not even an anti-virus program. The advantage to using a virtual machine is that I don’t have to worry about messing up a real computer.
Below, I have created a short slide show, which gives the results of my simple test.
Go here if you can’t see the embedded slideshow.
Conclusion:
Let the buyer beware. If I see over 300 errors reported on a clean PC, I have serious doubts and would never buy the software. What do you think about DoubleMySpeed and MyCleanPC? Would you buy them?