Thread: AVG skews traffic

MMmmmm ....Very interesting.
I have used AVG for many years....with great success.
I have sent AVG (Grisoft) an email querying this - AVG Anti-Virus and Internet Security - Contacts - We'll see what they come up with.

Egad!

You're absolutely right. I clicked on the link and got sucked into this, and spent hours generating frivolous clicks reading through the story.



Cheers
Simon

I've invented the "geek hook"!!

yea, The register is one of my faves,,,

I thought you wrote for them at one stage simon------

Whats a virus scanner?

I turned the linkscanner off on my computer as I noticed it was slowing it all down. I'm still only getting 300 kb/s out of my 512 connection though

and this---


AVG disguises fake traffic as IE6



Page: 1 2 Next >
By Cade Metz in San Francisco → More by this author
Published Thursday 26th June 2008 23:36 GMT
Nail down your security priorities. Ask the experts and your peers at The Register Security Debate, April 17, 2008
Exclusive AVG has rejiggered the fake traffic it's spewing across the internet, causing new headaches for the world's webmasters.
In late February, AVG paired its updated anti-virus engine with a real-time malware scanner that vets search engine results before you click on them. If you search Google, for instance, this LinkScanner automatically visits each address that turns up on Google's results page.
According to the company, more than 20 million people have downloaded the new AVG 8, and this has caused a huge up-tick in traffic on sites across the web, including The Register. Because the scanner attempts to disguise itself as a real live human click, webmasters who rely on log files for their traffic numbers may be unaware their stats are skewed. And others complain that LinkScanner has added extra dollars to their bandwidth bill.
Daniel Brandt, who runs Wikipedia Watch, estimates that LinkScanner traffic to the site has outstripped legitimate clicks by nearly ten times. In this graph, the pink line represents suspected LinkScanner scans, the blue line legitimate clicks:
LinkScanner meets Wikipedia Watch

When we first told the tale of AVG's fake traffic earlier this month, we pointed out that if webmasters were wise to the problem, they could filter LinkScanner visits from their log files. Each scan left a unique user agent: "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1;1813)."
But over the weekend, the company changed this user agent on the for-pay version of AVG 8. It appears that scans now use these agents as well:

Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1)
User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1)
User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1;1813)

Judging from the log files of two separate web sites, including Wikipedia Watch, the first agent is by far the most common. Which is bad news for webmasters. That's also the Internet Explorer 6 user agent. Unlike the other two - and the original "1813" agent - it's a perfectly valid agent that may turn up with real clicks.
AVG's chief of research Roger Thompson says the for-pay LinkScanner is only using the IE6 user agent. Presumably, the company believes this is more likely to fool malware exploits. "There are still ways for concerned web masters to filter LinkScanner requests out of their statistics," he told us over email. But he did not acknowledge that this could clip legitimate traffic as well.
Many webmasters may have no choice but to abandon log file analysis, adopting alternative tools from companies like Google, Yahoo!, comScore, or Nielsen NetRatings. And these tools have their drawbacks. comScore's service tends to underestimate traffic from daytime work machines. And if you go with Google Analytics, you have to tag your pages with JavaScript - and share your traffic numbers with Google.
Plus, these tools won't solve the bandwidth issue.

Does this mean that AVG will slow my computers?

I've had enough of CA, which takes over and slows everything down too much. This morning I had to pull the plug half way through boot-up number n just to get it to give me the safe mode option so I could disable CA and log on. The firewall was freezing everything.

I need a virus and firewall software. AVast seems only to be virus so I was thinking of AVG.

I don't want to spend the cash only to find out AVG is no different to CA.