LIKE MANY OTHER PEOPLE, I have Shareaza installed on one of my computers. It's useful for the occa¬sional, totally legitimate, download. And I know that Shareaza is now found at shareaza. sourceforge.net, not at shareaza.com. But as it turns out, someone forgot to mention that to the app itself.

Recently, when Shareaza did its check for updates, I got a standard update pop¬up from the program, telling me version PAY NO MIND This is not Shareaza's site, no matter what the logo says. 4.0 was available for download from shareaza.com. These were red flags #1 and #2-biggies. Shareaza updates very incrementally. My current version was something like 2.2.9.5. No way was ver¬sion 4 out. And yet I downloaded. Then I read the EULA, which was friendly and hip ... and mentioned opportunities to buy things and be part of a community. Small red flag, but it woke me enough to check out this "update."

Here's the skinny: Someone took advantage of old code in Shareaza that checks several URLs for updates. Among the URLs it checks is, which an unrelated company, Discordia, has now registered. So when the real Shareaza does its regular thing and checks in for updates, it offers to download the fake Shareaza to replace itself.

Shareaza.com claims to be the official home ofShareaza, with a Shareaza¬looking logo and a link to download version 4. There's no doubt this is a sleazy attempt to get you to download a program that's not the one you want, but is "Shareaza 4" actual mal¬ware? The Shareaza forums have 47 subtopics under the heading Shareaza .com Takeover, ShareazaV4 scam. According to Shareaza forum users:



•Fake Shareaza's uninstall routines evi¬dently don't work, at least not without some manual labor.

•Fake Shareaza requires a valid credit card; it is a free trial for a paid download service. (Note: When I tried out Fake Shareaza in a safe virtual machine, I did not have to supply credit card info.)

•F-Secure Anti-Virus has said, in response to queries, "The program shareazav4 itself is not a Trojan horse malware-it has a EULA and proper uninstallation tools. The same is true of the browser toolbar. It may be classed as a 'poten¬tially unwanted program'/riskware'." One poster installed fake Shareaza in a virtual machine & posted screenshots in a thread labeled I'm Installing V 4.

Ale5000, one of the developers of the real Shareaza, posted the following terse advice, the only official reference to this mess I could find on the site: "The shareaza .com site was taken by scammers, always get Shareaza from Unsurprisingly I couldn't get in touch with Discordia, the company listed as owning Official Home of Shareaza and that calls it "The Official Home of Shareaza."

Since it's not a virus, your AV won't detect it. Since it looks rather like a genu¬ine update box from a program you're actually running, you may not detect it. In fact, the latest version of Shareaza has fixed the update bug. But you need to know about this, because your only defense against a scam that has so many bases covered is to pay careful attention to every dialog box you encounter before you click OK. Get used to it, even if you don't run Shareaza; the Internet's not get¬ting any less sleazy.