Technology

AVG Fakes User Agent, Floods the Internet

Slimy anti-virus provider AVG is spamming the internet with deceptive traffic pretending to be Internet Explorer. Essentially, users of the software automatically pre-crawl search results, which is bad, but they do so with an intentionally generic user agent. This is flooding web sites with meaningless traffic; on Slashdot, they’re seeing them as 6% of their page traffic now. Best of all, they change their UA to avoid being filtered by web sites who are seeing massive increases in bandwidth from worthless robots — via Slashdot

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One Comment


  1. Lloyd Borrett

    20 July 2008 at 9.11 am

    AVG was alerted to this issue and quickly responded. See our site for full details.
    In short, updates were released at the beginning of July 2008 for AVG Anti-Virus Free Edition 8.0 plus the commercial AVG 8.0 products to resolve this issue.
    The latest version can be downloaded from http://www.avgfree.com.au or http://www.avg.com.au.
    Best Regards, Lloyd Borrett
    Marketing Manager, AVG (AU/NZ)

    Reply

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