In the mean time someone said they wanted an Antivirus that was not intrusive.

Well I have been using CA Etrus Antivirus the verison without all of the bells and whistles and have been since it was free many years ago.

It is a good quailty product that has never let me down.

Here is the best part. You can almost find this free for the first year after rebate if you send in a receipt proving you were using something else.

You can get it all the time at the New CompUSA if you have one or you can find always fine it here for free or no more than 5.00.

http://www.freeafterrebate.info/

Please note also that this program comes with three licenses and uninstalls easy without leaving a mess. Even cleans up it’s registry. Just be sure to get the basic version without all the add on products.

I am just wondering anyway what the point of integrating such a blanket link scanner technology into an antivirus program is. The latter should detect any malware anyway when it is about to be opened (I am using Avast for instance, which includes a Web Shield as well, but doesn’t use any link scanner).
Or was this all just a publicity stunt by AVG?

Thomas

An updated version of AVG Anti-Virus Free Edition 8.0 is already available. The Search-Shield component of LinkScanner has been modified to only notify users of malicious sites. The equivalent modification to the the AVG 8.0 commercial products will be rolled out on 9th July 2008.

Once the updated version has been rolled out to all AVG 8.0 users the issue will be resolved.

As of this date, Search-Shield will no longer scan each search result online for new exploits, which was causing the spikes that web masters addressed with us.

However, it is important to note that AVG still offers full protection against potential exploits through the LinkScanner Active Surf-Shield component of our product, which checks every page for malicious content as it is visited but before it is opened.

We’d like to thank the web community for bringing these challenges to our attention, as building community trust and protecting all of our users is critical to us.

Best Regards, Lloyd Borrett
Marketing Manager, AVG (AU/NZ)

Nothing like hearing publicity statements from corporate bots…

Well, I hope, Mr Lloyd Borrett is correct and that they will redefine ( or better yet – eliminate ) this aspect of their program. While they’re at it, it would be nice not to have error notifications that my viral definitions are out of date… even as soon as a few minutes after I updated them.

( AVG 8.0 was a big step backwards in many respects. )

In working with the web master community, AVG has responded immediately and on Tuesday, July 9th, AVG will issue a product modification to address the spikes that a few individuals have seen with their web traffic.

We have modified the Search-Shield component of the product to only notify users of malicious sites. Search-Shield no longer scans each search result online for new exploits, which was causing the spikes that web masters addressed with us. However, it is important to note that AVG still offers full protection against potential exploits through the Active Surf-Shield component of our product, which checks every page for malicious content as it is visited, but before it is opened.

We’d like to thank our web community for bringing these challenges to our attention, as building community trust and protecting all of our users is critical to us.

AVG’s primary concern is protecting our customers. In order to do this, we have actively provided our customers with cutting edge technology. There are 20,000 to 30,000 unique pieces of malware being submitted to anti-virus labs around the world each day, and the vast majority of these will be delivered via web based exploit and social engineering tricks from hacked and rogue websites.

Nearly all of these pieces of malware are designed to steal financial and personal information from victims. In order to protect our customers, and the world in general, we released technology in our free product that is designed to discover and block these sites. As a result of this, we included real-time, dynamic scanning in our free product that we recently released to customers.

Because of the unique nature of our technology – we scan web links before our customers open them to ensure they are safe – we anticipated that we would see a spike in the number of sites that were analysed, however, we underestimated the popularity of our product and the resulting number of verdicts that came back to us. As a result, we did not anticipate seeing the volumes we have seen in two months for another 24-36 months.

Today we are rendering over 1 billion verdicts per week that result in the identification of 1 infected URL per 43 searches which equates to rendering a red verdict to 1 in every nine 9 users. While this has affected web traffic analysis and marketing analytics on a handful of sites, we are dedicated to protecting our users with the best technology on the market today while at the same time not being disruptive.

I did an experiment way back then. I did a search for my company’s domain (with 100 search results as my normal in Google), and had over 100 hits. What I never mentioned before now is, either there was a glitch in the software, or it’s be default, but it also downloaded a 250MB file to scan as well (it’s a zip file of data that’s freely available to visitors on my site). The file came up on 20 of the links…. Do the math. It’s a popular link that shows up for normal searches for the site.

I contacted AVG within 30 minutes of installing version 8 (it had that many problems). As I told them, and they acknowledged, if you click on a link – avg scans the page. So if a user searches for your site, you’ll be scanned then. Then if they click on your link — it’ll be scanned again. The linkscanner is redundant, if you click a link – the page and memory/etc is scanned to prevent a virus. It just wastes bandwidth, processor cycles and memory.

Clearly that’s another concern “not anticipated” prior to RTM.