Posted on 06/27/2008 12:05:44 PM PDT by LibWhacker
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 (http://www.wikipedia-watch.org/), 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 (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/06/13/avg_scanner_skews_web_traffic_numbers/) 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)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.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)
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.
In an effort to fix this problem, one web master advocates redirecting AVG scans back to AVG's site. "Many webmasters simply tell LinkScanner to scan AVG's site instead, so their site gets marked as malware free every time - while AVG gets handed the extra bandwidth cost," says the webmaster of TheSilhouettes.org (http://www.TheSilhouettes.org/).
But this assumes that AVG is using a unique agent. And at the moment, it's not. The send-it-back-to-AVG method may redirect legitimate clicks as well.
Which gets to the heart of the matter: AVG's security philosophy is fundamentally at odds with webmaster peace of mind. The company wants to scan search results, and it wants to scan them in a way that's difficult to distinguish from real traffic. "In order to detect the really tricky - and by association, the most important - malicious content, we need to look just like a browser driven by a human being," AVG chief of research Roger Thompson has told us.
And if that causes problems for webmasters, Thompson says, so be it. "I don't want to sound flip about this, but if you want to make omelets, you have to break some eggs."
Clearly, the company doesn't fully realize the importance of web analytics. "Web analytics is about finding trends which can help online marketers/webmasters improve things for their visitors and their businesses," says Steve Jackson, co-chair of the International Web Analytics Association. "It's a big part of the whole online ecosystem in a fast growing up industry.
"No-one wants spyware or viruses, and AVG does provide a useful service which is getting better all the time. I wish, however, they would take business needs into account before launching software that makes life even more difficult for the people trying to do the analytics. Web analytics is not easy at the best of times, and this kind of thing from AVG just compounded the problem.
"In order to make an omelet you have to crack some eggs. But a good omelet has cheese, ham, peppers, mushrooms and all sorts of other ingredients which AVG seem to have forgotten about."
But AVG continues to say it's working to solve the problem - including the bandwidth issue. Referring to LinkScanner's new IE6-like user agent, Thompson told us, "We intend to leave those in place until we can find the right balance point which will allow us to continue to provide the best possible protection for our customers, without imposing too much extra bandwidth on websites." ®
read later
bttt
| Percent slower | |||
| Boot |
CPU |
Disk |
|
| Norton Internet Security 2006 | 46% | 20% | 2369% |
| McAfee VirusScan Enterprise 8 | 7% | 20% | 2246% |
| Norton Internet Security 2007 | 45% | 8% | 1515% |
| Trend Micro PC-cillin AV 2006 | 2% | 0% | 1288% |
| ZoneAlarm ISS | 16% | 0% | 992% |
| Norton Antivirus 2002 | 11% | 8% | 658% |
| Windows Live OneCare | 11% | 8% | 512% |
| Webroot Spy Sweeper | 6% | 8% | 369% |
| Nod32 v2.5 | 7% | 8% | 177% |
| avast! 4.7 Home | 4% | 8% | 115% |
| Windows Defender | 5% | 8% | 54% |
| Panda Antivirus 2007 | 20% | 4% | 15% |
| AVG 7.1 Free | 15% | 0% | 19% |
GNU/Linux is not a security panacea. It can be cracked, too.
I’m running AVG Free v8 and have noticed the little icons popping up on Google search results pages, but never really put together just what it was doing. I may see if there’s a way to turn this feature off. Malware protection is nice, but I tend to be extremely careful about where I surf anyway.
}:-)4
AVG 7.5 is still available for business and network use, and still works well. The price works out to $10 per CPU per year, including servers.
my version 8 is still free. the site is somewhat misleading. if you look hard enough you will find the link to the free version.
Me too ... but limited to 7.5 ... I run W98 .... hardly a headache, easy to fix, serves the purpose.
Guess what? Nothing is certain except death and taxes.
But I have NEVER in 18 years had a virus on my linux box. I have never had anyone hack one, well, I take that back, one one time because I didn’t set ANYthing up on it and set it up to be hacked...
I have NEVER had a machine touched on my network behind a properly set up fire wall, but most importantly NEVER had a virus, and no, you can’t crack my machines.... and I doubt anyone can.
they have a free version of version 8!
http://www.download.com/AVG-Anti-Virus-Free-Edition/3000-2239_4-10320142.html
“I turned that stupid scanner off. I like AVG, but my quad-core box came to a screeching halt every time the scanner went off hitting dozens of sites in the search results. It wasn’t worth the lost time.”
Yeah I’ve turned off the scanner too. And if you upgrade to Firefox 3, the AVG scanner isn’t compatible anyway :)
“I was a big AVG 7.5 fan but uninstalled their new 8.0 because it killed the performance of my machine. It’s giant bloatware now too.”
Did you buy ver 8? Because the free edition works wonderfully...I don’t even know it’s running.
I manage several dozen PCs and in 10 years have never seen a virus on any machine that had an up-to-date AV program of any kind.
Back around 1998 or so Melissa got through a lot of scanners. Prior to that, people didn’t take the potential very seriously.
The Linux kernel has only been around since 1991, so that would make it seventeen years. And virii aren't the only things that can infest a box: worms, rootkits, back doors, and all sorts of other goodies can get in.
I have NEVER had a machine touched on my network behind a properly set up fire wall, but most importantly NEVER had a virus...
Now, that's not a function of Linux at all. That's a function of good security practice.
...and no, you can’t crack my machines.... and I doubt anyone can.
The GNU/Linux operating system and related open-source software applications are very good and significantly more secure than Windows, by default, because the operating system was designed with more of a focus on security than Windows. However, that doesn't mean it can't be broken, and thinking that it can't (or that your systems are impenetrable) is a very dangerous mindset.
Oh, and even if I could crack your boxen, I wouldn't, cause I have better things to do.
I had the free version of 8.0 and I knew every time it was doing something. I have a fairly beefy developer machine and it was running smoothly before the 8.0 install so it had to go.
I had also disabled the link scanner but that didn't help and I didn't like the giant red X in the system tray that gave the appearance something was wrong.
“The GNU/Linux operating system and related open-source software applications are very good and significantly more secure than Windows, by default, because the operating system was designed with more of a focus on security than Windows. However, that doesn’t mean it can’t be broken, and thinking that it can’t (or that your systems are impenetrable) is a very dangerous mindset.”
Like with Apple’s claims of better security (which it does have), it’s not foolproof and I make the assertion that if 90% of the world’s computers were running Linux or Apple, there would still be viruses.
self ping
No, incorrect. It is inherently more secure because the operating system has permission levels that are NOT in Windows systems. Even if 90% were running it and there were viruses (which there are viruses for Unix-like OSes) they still would not be rampant as they are in Windows machine. What you and the others are failing to understand is that there a MILLIONS of *nix-based systems out there, in the government, in schools and in homes and golly, none of them in all these years have been taken out like Windows machines have.
Certainly, you get some that aren’t properly set up and get snatched out from under the owners because they didn’t set up the lockouts properly, didn’t prevent people from gaining access to the root password or they didn’t properly set their password (the most common password in the WORLD is “password”.... duh)...
My system is set up specifically to use for one thing. Browsing the internet and getting mail. Period. All processes and services not necessary are off. The machine is behind a firewall (hardware) that simply WILL NOT let you get to my machine or even if you got a malware on it, allow the malware out. Sorry, you can’t “break” it that way. I’m not “thinking” it can’t, I KNOW it can’t and I’ve dared some of the best to break in. They can’t... and we’ve got a lot of them right here where I work ;)
Anyway, the point is, this isn’t about ‘bragging’, it’s about being Security proactive on computer security and the REASON that people have fouled up windows machines in the FIRST PLACE isn’t anything to do with the OS, it has to do with the user of the system and their LACK of knowledge on computer security. If you know what you’re doing you can protect anything properly. If you don’t, you rely on BS software like the crap mentioned in this article.
I’ve managed several hundred PCs and dozens of networks over the years. They GET viruses even with up-to-date software. The software MITIGATES the virus, it doesn’t always PREVENT it.
Firewalls are your friends though....
And to appease the people slamming “unix-like” systems as “no better than anything else” - well, they PASS VIRUSES TOO, just like windows machines can do. What they DON’T do it become infected, or if they do, only at the user level. (Assuming you’re not using root as your local user login and if you are, then... you deserve what you get, lol)
So we agree, Unix boxes are not impenetrable. That’s all I was saying. If Linux was the dominant OS, it would be the target like Windows is.
And Windows sucks by the way, I’m not a defender of Microsoft...believe me. I only run it because I’m a gamer and most of my games won’t run happily or at all on Linux.
I’m happily running XP and I’m very good about security and not doing the things that get malware onto your machine. And I’m avoiding Vista like the plague.
Regardless of the OS you run, as you said firewalls and smart computing are the way to go.
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