A columnist at the News and Observer recently wrote an article called “How To Safely Clear Your Computer of Spyware” and referred readers to Lavasoft’s Ad-Aware software. However, some users ran into trouble when they tried to download Ad-Aware Free. We’d like to pass on that news so you can see why it’s so important to be careful what you click.

Lavasoft’s Ad-Aware Free program is 100 percent free for home, non-commercial use – no strings attached. However, some readers wrote in to the News and Observer, saying that the security program they downloaded identified a certain number of “errors” on their PC, asking them to purchase a ‘plus’ version in order to fix those errors. While these users believed that they had downloaded Ad-Aware, in actuality, they had mistakenly downloaded other software.

How did it happen? We’ll walk you through the steps you can take to correctly download Ad-Aware Free.

1. Go to www.lavasoft.com and select the option to Download Ad-Aware Free.

 2. On the landing page you’re directed to, click “Download” to continue to download Ad-Aware Free.

3. The next step is to download Ad-Aware from Lavasoft’s trusted download site partner, CNET Download.com. To complete your download, simply click “Download Now”, as referenced with the red arrow, below:

Here’s where users ran into trouble:

Clicking on sponsored link advertisements will NOT lead to the download of Lavasoft’s Ad-Aware Free software. For example, if you click the sponsored link on the right column of the page, above, you will download a program called CyberDefender. This is NOT a Lavasoft product or software affiliated in any way with Lavasoft or Ad-Aware. According to Lavasoft’s Malware Labs threat analysts, the CyberDefender program will detect some malware on the user’s machine, along with installing the Microsoft Bing toolbar; in order to remove the reported threats, the user needs to pay for a CyberDefender license, in the amount of $29.

It’s just another reminder to be careful what you click!