Why would an online bill payment service be giving away from copies of antivirus software?
Because their customers computers may have been infected with a virus while using CheckFree’s website.
CheckFree explains:
Your computer may be infected if all of the following are true:
– You attempted to access online bill payment between 12:30 a.m. and 10:10 a.m. Eastern time (GMT -5) on Tuesday, December 2, 2008, and
– You were using a computer with the Windows operating system, and
– You reached a blank screen rather than the usual bill payment screen when you attempted to navigate to online bill payment, and
– After reaching the blank screen, your computer’s virus protection program did not tell you via pop-up or other messaging that malicious software was detected and quarantined.
If all four of the conditions above are true, your computer may be infected. We have partnered with McAfee®, the world’s largest dedicated security technology company, to provide you with a complimentary copy of its VirusScan® Plus software which, when installed, will detect, block and remove any malicious software from your computer hard drive.
This feels a bit like getting antibiotics from a hooker.
Even worse is how much CheckFree sucks. Can’t Excel take the time to set up their own bill-pay site? It’s not rocket surgery.
Not that I want to tempt fate but, with AVG already installed on my computer, I wonder if AVG would’ve detected the virus? It’s caught a couple of other ones in the past but it happens so infrequently to me (I practice safe-interneting) that it still startles me when I see a warning pop up.