The Microsoft security team has updated its evaluation criteria for malware with a useful and necessary purpose: to specify that programs should not use alarming and coercive messages to pressure users to buy a product.

That is, those alarmist advertising messages from programs that shout to you that they have found errors or threats in your system, trying to convince you to install something to do a deeper scan and then pass through the box to solve the supposed errors, are now vetoed.

In Microsoft have noticed that there has been an increase in the number of free versions of programs that use these tactics to try to get the user to buy a premium version. You have probably noticed it sometimes if you are a Windows user.

Windows Defender already has new orders

As of March 1, 2018 all programs that display coercive messages like these will be classified as unwanted software, detected and deleted by Windows Defender.

An excellent news for those who know a relative who constantly believes all these messages and has filled your computer with garbage, you will not have to do the favor of cleaning your Windows, Windows will clean this alone.

So that a program of these is not detected as unwanted can not show alarming or coercive messages or with deceptive content to pressure the user to pay for additional services.

The three characteristics of abusive software

The coercive software has three main behaviors, although they are not limited to:

• Report errors in an exaggerated or alarming way on the user’s system and that requires the person to pay money to solve the errors, or to do things like take surveys, download files, subscribe to a newsletter , etc.
• Suggest that no other action will solve the reported problems and errors.
• Require that the user act in a limited period of time to be able to solve the alleged problem.

This measure is part of the new requirements that Microsoft began to demand since 2016 to “optimization and cleaning programs”. These should inform the user in detail about what he supposedly needs to fix.

Apparently among this type of software is common to show error messages without any description in order to exaggerate the results and make the user believe that they are correcting many problems, so it should be worth it.

The user must have all the possible information so that he can evaluate the error for himself , validate it and decide if he wants to use the program to correct it.

Basically it is Microsoft trying to protect us from deceptive advertising within the software ecosystem in Windows, one that has been the breeding ground of this type of practices for years and years.