BE AWARE ESPECIALLY IF YOU’RE USING G-ARCHIVER !!

G-Archiver is a program used to back up Gmail emails. A professional programmer, Dustin Brooks has just revealed that G-Archiver is a malicious spyware application that emails your Gmail username and password to a secret Gmail account. He found a spyware system inside when he tried to analyze the source code of the program. He accessed the so called “secret account” and found thousands of records of usernames and passwords inside, including, of course, his own. Brooks is so good as he deleted all those records and changed the password on the account by way of vigilante justice.

This is very troubling because most Gmail users use a single Google account to access a wide range of services. Those with AdSense accounts or Google Checkout accounts could face severe financial losses if their Gmail password were stolen.

Meanwhile, G-Archiver team has just made an announcement on their website that the program was not spyware but rather that a member of their development team had inserted coding used for testing G-Archiver in the debug version and forgot to delete it in the final release version. ( …Obviously, it’s an stupid excuse… )

My personal advice:
So, if you’ve ever installed the program you should uninstall it and change your Google account password immediately. Please don’t think that an anti-spyware program could fix this. It probably will not show up in scans from most anti-spyware programs yet as G-Archiver is so new.

Even if the “stupid excuse” is “corrected”, I still don’t recommend installing the upcoming new version of G-Archiver when it’s released. Please also be aware on other third party email archiving or backup programs. Not all are spyware, but you should still be careful when using these programs. To be sure, you should check or scan the program’s files using an updated anti-spyware or anti-virus program or search through some famous forums to see reviews of people who using those programs and determine whether it’s safe to use or not.