Hi all,
I ran across a bogus website that is a visual clone of kicad.org
Avoid this site: kicadsoft . net/en/index.php (spaces added to avoid a link being generated). There is an installer that ends up putting Installer_Advanced_Genius_v3o.4.exe and Installer_Mega_Master_v7.4i.7.exe on your system (at least Windows systems).
Cheers,
Bob
Thanks for the warning. On Linux myself,so no problem, others are not so lucky.
Thanks for the heads up. I’ve reported this to dropbox (which hosts the installer)
Where did you run across this site btw?
I just did a search on Google for “kicad” (without the quotes). It was the sponsored link. I later went back, and kicad.org came up, so you need to try the search a couple times.
I reported the ad to Google.
The google search screenshot shows: “Free Trial Today”. Hmmm… 
I have collaborated on an Open Source application which somebody took with other related Open Source sw and sold them in (then current, now obsolete) CD format, without informing they are available freely. Immoral at least, but I don’t remember how severely they offended the licence, if at all. Some people lost a little bit of money, and we couldn’t do anything. Suing people isn’t realistic for volunteer projects.
This malware is much more serious. Thanks for taking actions.
For the record, the same attacker is also running fake freecad pages as well some other software like jira and parsec.
Warning: I wanted to give a short answer, but it turned into a bit of an off topic rant
I stopped using google quite a few years ago. They used to have a do no evil slogan, but that is not compatible with their advertisement. And for the last 10 to 20 years they are attempting some balancing act between selling everybody’s soul to the highest bidder, and not loosing too much credibility, which would undermine their long term profitability.
If you have a hard look at the advertisement business, you will see that it does not connect people with products they want or need. Advertisements only connect people with products for which some big company paid huge sums to spread their name. If you allow yourself to be mislead by an advertisement, you pay to much for a product that only does a part of what you want. If you are tempted by any kind of advertisement, then see it as a starting point to do some research to what you actually want, and what product fits that need best.
One of the reasons advertisements work is that it is a continuation of mouth to mouth advertisements. The big difference is that in “real life” you only listen to people you trust. Advertisements skip that “trust” part, and apparently a lot of people do not notice this. Another reason advertisements work, is a lot of people have more money than they have (spare) time, and they just don’t care to think about such things.
And in the mean time, it has gotten to the point that the vast majority of reviews you see anywhere on the internet are fake. And even politics is becoming ever more fake with fake news. I am also sure that one of the mayor uses of AI will be to mislead more people, and shifting more power to shrewd and cunning people, but without much of a moral standard.
“… vast majority of reviews you see anywhere on the internet are fake”
Perhaps we’ll see more A.I. powered tools like Fakespot to help us sort/wade through this mess of time and resource wasting deception.
My PA-440 Firewall also contains some AI/ML capabilities to improve bad actor detection and blocking (still isn’t foolproof).
It keeps getting uglier out there.
Stay safe everyone.
EDIT / UPDATE: so, the base site of <edit> removed </edit> seems to be ok, it’s only if you specifically go to the “en/index.php”, or even just the “/en” page, then you get the “Kicad Site Clone”! I guess that’s what the google search went to!
(Still not good! The tutorial site is clearly quite old, refers to version 5)
Maybe something has been changed, but the site looks very “normal” now.
The link to download Kicad correctly links to kicad.org … maybe the whole site had been temporarily hacked?
They stole the content from a reputable site (https://www.build-electronic-circuits.com/) for their fake site.
Please don’t link them here as it just helps their traffic. These should all be disappeared from google now but flag them if you see them pop up again.
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