AVG Fakes User Agent, Floods the Internet
Posted: Fri Jul 04, 2008 6:15 pm
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/07/03/1411254
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.