Many Spotify users are complaining that its freemium service is infecting their browsers with malware.
Last year, the music and video streaming giant Spotify was in the bad news when Russian hackers were suspected to have hacked some of its users’ accounts or when the company’s CEO Daniel Ek apologized for collecting private data of its users. But now, a number of Spotify premium users are complaining that the service is infecting their browsers with malware ads by loading malicious sites without their permission.
One of the Spotify’s users going by the handle of TonyOnly reported on Spotify community about unusual activity on his browser.
“There’s something pretty alarming going on right now with Spotify Free. This started a several hours ago. If you have Spotify Free open, it will launch – and keep on launching – the default internet browser on the computer to different kinds of malware / virus sites. Some of them do not even require user action to be able to cause harm.”
In reply, Jason from Spotify said that the company is investigating the issue.
“We’re currently looking into this with the team here. We’ll pass that information on to the investigating team. We’ll also make sure to update this thread once we have a further update to share with you.”
At first, it was reported that only Windows 10 users are facing the issue but later it turned out that Mac and Ubuntu users are not safe either.
@SpotifyCares Yesterday the Spotify Free software started launching malware on my Mac's Safari on its own. Many have the same experience atm
— Taru Kalvi (@tarukalvi) October 5, 2016
https://twitter.com/SamuNuutamo/status/783560835704713216
PSA: uninstall Spotify free, their ads are plagued with malware right now. pic.twitter.com/DUOqDrnDUZ
— Volp (@VolpRS) October 5, 2016
If you are a Spotify Free Service user and your browser is acting weird that’s maybe because it is infected with malware delivered from any of the malicious sites you may have visited.
Update:
Spotify is now claiming that it has identified and solved the issue:
“A small number of users have experienced a problem with questionable website pop-ups in their default browsers as a result of an isolated issue with an ad on our free tier. We have now identified the source of the problem and have shut it down. We will continue to monitor the situation.”
