Sunday, July 6, 2008

The End of the LinkScanner Controversy?

Slashdot reports on and Australian website's reaction to being flooded by traffic by AVG's LinkScanner. As before, AVG has promised to fix this problem. It's nice to see an anti-virus company—particularly a company which makes its products available for free—listening to its users and fixing its products. Commercial anti-virus companies like Symantec and McAfee turned their products into bloated messes years ago and its nice to see AVG back away before doing the same.
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1 comment:

Lloyd Borrett said...

AVG has already responded to resolve this issue. The full response can be seen at http://www.avg.com.au/index.cfm?section=news&feature=104

An updated version of AVG Anti-Virus Free Edition 8.0 is already available, see http://www.avgfree.com.au. The Search-Shield component of LinkScanner has been modified to only notify users of malicious sites. The equivalent modification to the the AVG 8.0 commercial products will be rolled out on 9th July 2008.

Once the updated version has been rolled out to all AVG 8.0 users the issue will be resolved.

As of this date, Search-Shield will no longer scan each search result online for new exploits, which was causing the spikes that web masters addressed with us.

However, it is important to note that AVG still offers full protection against potential exploits through the LinkScanner Active Surf-Shield component of our product, which checks every page for malicious content as it is visited but before it is opened.

We’d like to thank the web community for bringing these challenges to our attention, as building community trust and protecting all of our users is critical to us.

Best Regards, Lloyd Borrett
Marketing Manager, AVG (AU/NZ)

July 7, 2008 at 1:56 AM

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