Kaizenlog

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| AVG Fakes User Agent, Floods the Internet                          |
|   from the way-to-go-guys dept.                                    |
|   posted by CmdrTaco on Thursday July 03, @11:18 (Security)        |
|   http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/07/03/1411254 |
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Slimy anti-virus provider AVG is [0]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 websites
with meaningless traffic (on Slashdot, we’re seeing them as like 6% of
our page traffic now). Best of all, they [1]change their UA to avoid
being filtered by websites who are seeing massive increases in bandwidth
from worthless robots.

Discuss this story at:
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=08/07/03/1411254

Links:
0. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/06/26/avg_disguises_fake_traffic_as_ie6/
1. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/07/02/linkscanner_fake_traffic_temporary_fix/