Posts by Chuck

AVG scanner blasts internet with fake traffic

@ my anonymous coward friends

@ anonymous coward: It has flagged many sites in my Google search results and several others i've clicked on from other sites. When I click on a bad hyperlink, Linkscanner prevents me from connecting to it. Try it for 30 days free and see what you've been missing. Or, better yet, don't try it, and when the day comes you've been owned by a botnet, you might want to scan for a rootkit, and if you find one, it probably got there via a drivebydownloaded exploit that you could have prevented if only you weren't so full of yourself. Why is it that some security professionals think they know everything?

@ second anonymous coward: You wrote, "If you can be owned by visting a poisoned site, then you deserve to be. No LinkScanner will save your ass" That dumb statement only demonstrates your ignorance. I'm not visiting warez sites or any other sites where one might deserve to get hit by malware. These are ordinary sites on the web. If you'd prefer not to know a malicious site is trying to nail you (even if you are patched), then by all means, bury your head deeper in the sand.

@ everyone: inform yourselves. The misinformation on this thread is truly laughable. As John Thompson pointed out, exploits are different from viruses. You need AV software AND anti-exploit software. It's all about layering. If someone truly evaluates the product and takes the time to learn what it does, what it doesn't do, and how it's different from AV and AS and firewalls and intrusion detection systems, and they still decide they don't like it or don't need it, or they like a competitive product better, I can at least respect you for arriving at an informed opinion. But so many of the commenters here don't know the difference between an exploit or a virus, don't understand how the things spread, and haven't evaled the product.

Get a clue people

I am amazed at the supreme level ignorance among so many of the LinkScanner critics here, many of whom probably consider themselves security experts. What a sorry group. I guess that's the crowd you attract with inflammatory statements intended to stir the irrational fears of people (Joseph Goebbels and Karl Rove would be proud, El Reg).

Get a clue people. I've been using the paid version of LinkScanner since shortly after the company introduced it. Too many times to mention I've been protected from exploitive web sites listed in Google's search results, or contained on trusted sites. Yes, I'm patched, so maybe 80% of these wouldn't have affected me, yet I still don't want to visit a poisoned web page for obvious reasons. And what about the 95%+ of users out there who don't maintain regular patches, or what about all of us who need protection against (albeit rare) zero days before a patch is available?

Someday, once the masses get more properly educated than some of the ignoramuses on this thread, they will refuse to click on any hyperlink until it has been properly scanned by LinkScanner or a similar real time scanner (Note most of Linkscanner's competitors including McAfee's are NOT real time so they're essentially useless), just as my 65 year old mum knows not to click on file attachments from unknown senders (and even trusted senders) in her email, or how more enlightened novices have learned not to click on malicious ecard greetings.

If you're a web site operator, don't your visitors deserve to receive some verification of the real time safety of your site? What are you trying to hide? Your ignorance? Your ostrich beak?

If people here truly studied LinkScanner, how it operates and the thinking behind its (IMHO) clever low impact approach to stopping web exploits, you might arrive at a different conclusion.