Sorry, y'all may not care about this but I do, and it's Independence Day, right?
How to beat AVG's fake traffic spew
A header to save the internet
By Cade Metz in San Francisco
Published Wednesday 2nd July 2008 05:20 GMT
Bundled with AVG's newest anti-virus engine, AVG 8, and used by roughly 20 million people worldwide, LinkScanner checks search engine results for malware before you on click them. If you type a keyword into Google, for instance, it automatically visits each address that appears on Google's results page.
This has caused an enormous spike in traffic on sites across the web, including The Register, and many webmasters may not realize where these hits are coming from. Hoping to fool malware writers, LinkScanner mimics real live human clicks. At least in part.
When scanning pages, LinkScanner employs the IP addresses of those 20 million people who use the product, and as of last week, it sends the same user agent as Microsoft's IE6 browser.
Delicious
Digg
Reddit
Newsvine
Furl
Google
Yahoo
LinkScanner - an official response from AVG
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. We have modified the Search-Shield component of LinkScanner to only notify users of malicious sites; this modified version will be rolled out on July 9th 2008. As of this date. Search-Shield will no longer scan each search result online for new exploits, which was causing the spikes that webmasters 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.
Much better.
Much better.