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AVG Fakes User Agent, Floods the Internet

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the way-to-go-guys dept.

Slimy anti-virus provider AVG is 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 change their UA to avoid being filtered by websites who are seeing massive increases in bandwidth from worthless robots.

3 of 928 comments (clear)

  1. Oh Boo Hoo by JamieKitson · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    Everybody knows that web stats are worthless. And if people want to keep their bandwidth low they should clean up their sites. I for one welcome our... etc.

  2. In Soviet Googlestan? by Jeremiah+Cornelius · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    In Soviet Googlestan, agents fake YOU!

    --
    "Flyin' in just a sweet place,
    Never been known to fail..."
  3. Re:F5 IRule by bluefoxlucid · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    Sweet, a helpful astroturfer. How much do they pay you to astroturf? Is that your primary job function or are you unofficially a part of Damage Control?

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