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Chrome Flagging Spotify as Harmful Program

Chrome Flagging Spotify as Harmful Program

When trying to download the Spotify application for Mac, I am getting a message from the Chrome browser stating "The site ahead contains harmful programs".  I am trying to download the Spotify install zip file from https://www.spotify.com/us/download/mac.  The url which is getting flagged is https://d1clcicqv97n4s.cloudfront.net/SpotifyInstaller.zip.

 

I am running OS X Yosemite version 10.10.3 and Google Chrome version 43.0.2357.124 (64-bit).  Please let me know if this is a false positive or there is malicious intent.

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I am on linux, for that url (1) I get no warning by chromium 44.0.x

 

Here is the md5 sum if you want to compare with your file:

99c6a66b7e91bc682b8293714d0088cb SpotifyInstaller.zip (114.1 KiB)

 

(1) https://www.spotify.com/us/download/mac

Hi there and welcome to the community,

 

Thanks for reporting.

I've reported your issue to the staff. I'll let you know when I have more information.


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Google is (likely, I have no inside information) responding to complaints that the latest version of Spotify is either shipping with adware, or are accepting 'bad actor' ads that are doing things they shouldn't be doing.  (See already linked post in this thread)

*Edit:Grammar

I am not certain how Google Chrome is performing these checks exactly, but it looks like it scans zip files prior to dowloading to your endpoint (e.g. laptop, desktop).  The Amazon CloudFront CDN that is used to deliver the Spotify zip file seems to be the issue.

 

I tried downloading the Spotify application through Safari and I did not run into this issue due to how Chrome handles scanning zip files.  I installed the application and none of my security tools detected malicious intent during or after installation.

Not surprising. New app behaves as a malware because it's a really painful experience to disable Spotify automatically starting when computer starts, for instance.

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