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June 28, 2008
Unintended Consequences
The anti-virus industry's been making a bit of news recently. Seems AVG techs have come up with a new slant to pre-empting malware which vector in via webpages. It "vets search engine results before you click on them". If you Google search, their LinkScanner has to go out by itself, ahead of you and visit the webpage using your machine. This has consequences, however. It is said to use a variety of user-agent strings (heh, that's how webservers can log / stat what type of browser visits them) and some of these strings are exactly the same as Internet Explorer. So, for all intents and purposes, the webserver can't tell whether a human using IE is visiting the website or this automated pre-emptive robot. And if the webserver can't figure out which is which, the ad companies and the webmasters can't either.
Wonder whether pretty Eva Chen's cloudy outlook will come up with any gotchas....
Posted by Anandasim at June 28, 2008 02:42 PM
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Comments
LinkScanner provides the only real-time protection against web exploits available. Other vendors are trying to use blacklists which simply cannot work against transient web exploits.
By going out and checking the web sites at the time it really matters - before and/or when you click on the link - LinkScanner delivers true real-time protection.
In order to work properly, LinkScanner needs to fly "under the radar" and be seen as if it were a human using a web browser. That it does this is a true feature.
If a consequence of protecting users from poisoned web sites is that web masters may have to adjust the way they do their analytics then so be it. After all, the protection provided by LinkScanner is only required because many web masters can't properly secure their web sites. So the source of this so called problem depends on which view you take of the rapid rise in the use of web exploits by cyber criminals.
Posted by: Lloyd Borrett at June 30, 2008 10:51 AM
AVG Technologies has quickly responded to resolve concerns raised about the functionality of the safe search LinkScanner Search-Shield component in it products. See http://www.avg.com.au/index.cfm?section=news&feature=104 for the full details.
Posted by: Lloyd Borrett at July 7, 2008 02:32 PM
Thanks Lloyd, for keeping us up to date, I am sure this is re-assuring to AVG users.
Posted by: anandasim ![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://bleedingedge.com.au/blog/nav-commenters.gif)
at July 7, 2008 05:16 PM