AVG addresses "fake traffic" concerns

Friday the 13th (of June) was an unlucky day for the folks at AVG, an anti-virus vendor known for its free Windows scanner. On that day, tech site The Register reported that a component of the paid version of AVG’s security suite was generating large amounts of “fake traffic” to websites in its effort to proactively protect users:

Early last month, webmasters here at The Reg noticed an unexpected spike in our site traffic. Suddenly, we had far more readers than ever before, and they were reading at a record clip. Visits actually doubled on certain landing pages, and more than a few ho-hum stories attracted an audience worthy of a Pulitzer Prize winner. Or so it seemed.

As it turns out, much of this traffic was driven by the new malware scanner from AVG Technologies.

Six months ago, AVG acquired Exploit Prevention Labs and its LinkScanner, a tool that automatically scans search engine results before you click on them. If you search Google, for instance, and ten results turn up, it visits all ten links to ensure they’re malware free.

After protests from webmasters, perhaps fanned in part by Nathan McFeters’s blog post last Friday, The Register reports that AVG is modifying its product to no longer pre-scan pages that a user hasn’t clicked on yet.

Note that Nathan went as far as to call AVG’s LinkScanner “badware” in Friday’s blog post on ZDNet. Here at StopBadware.org, we did not evaluate the product against our Badware Guidelines, nor do we intend to now that the product is being modified.