WARNING: The material presented here may be offensive to some readers. It relates to the promotion of online porn and other questionable practices. If you are not comfortable with it then please surf away from here.

In follow up discussions and investigations of IObit, it has been discovered that part of their marketing plan is to use questionable search terms to drive traffic to their sites and products. NOTE: This has nothing to do with the alleged theft of intellectual property by IObit.

I have issues with at least 2 pages that they are currently hosting (note that I made sure the links below are not “clickable” and would need to be copy and pasted into your browser if you want to see them, just so it doesn’t happen by accident).

http://www.iobit.com/porn-games.html

http://www.iobit.com/naruto-hentai.html

While these pages do not explicitly host porn, they are promoting their products by directing users from those pages back to the main IObit pages. Note also that it has been proven that these pages have been up for some time now, long before the property theft scandal, and they have not been hacked.

Searching Google on very (I would assume) common terms used for folks who search on this stuff such as “hentai porn” or “porn games”, puts these pages in the top 10 or 20 rankings. Not bad, if you’re IObit. That will direct a lot of people your way, using very questionable methods.

Another product they are promoting, P2PTurbo, claims to greatly enhance and speed up peer2peer client performance. Now again, not illegal, but highly questionable.

Here is why I state that. Both online porn and P2P use are probably the number 1 and 2 ways that users get infected with Malware in the first place. I see it every day in helping folks in the forums. Many have P2P clients installed and admit to using them. And while I have no direct proof on porn I think we can all agree that the practice, while not illegal, is questionable. Tech note: If you ever want to get yourself infected (and I’m not suggesting or promoting this), fire up your favorite search engine, search on some porn keywords, click some links, and in no time you will have the opportunity to pick up some great, fresh Malware.

As far as I know, IObit has not even responded to questions on these tactics and the pages are still live as of today. In the main discussion thread at IObit I have asked that they be pulled and have adamantly voiced my opinion. The mods and the supporters have been patient and very active in this thread, but as far as I can tell no official representation from IObit has been made. Even some of its’ most emphatic supporters and losing patience and showing less support.

IObit accusation thread (warning, 33 pages of posts in 3 days).

Things just keep getting worse for IObit. MalwareBytes may have shoveled a bit of a hole for them, but they had already brought the heavy equipment and put in the foundation.