Mobile and Secure.Com

I read a recent posting on The Register about the latest version of the AVG antivirus tool, which resulted in me disabling the LinkScanner tool.

AVG 8.0 added LinkScanner in April and apparently one of the things it does is to scan links on Search Engine pages before you click on them to make sure that the landing pages do not contain malicious code.

The article talks about the side effects of using LinkScanner such as increasing traffic to websites with no actual human interaction being involved in the visit, and increasing your internet bandwidth usage. All well and good but what about other implications? If you read further on page 2 of the posting it goes on to explain that AVG pretends to be you and doesn’t mask your IP address or anything, so as far as that site is concerned, you visited it.

So what’s the problem? Well if you searched for something in Google and got ten links returned, one or more of those links could be to adult or anti-social content and your computer would actually visit them. Your ISP would then have a log on its server saying that a computer at your IP address visited a site that contained pornography or other such material.

To turn of LinkScanner open the AVG User Interface, double-click LinkScanner and untick “Enable AVG Search-Shield”.