
AVG disguises fake traffic as IE6 - nickb
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/06/26/avg_disguises_fake_traffic_as_ie6/
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petercooper
One wonders if there's an "advantage" you could gain from this.. If your site
is getting requested by AVG but NOT a valid browser, you can assume someone
did a search that you appeared on but they did NOT click on you. This metric
could be useful for improving your CTR in regular search results, something
totally impossible to measure before.

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spydez
The problem being you've no idea why they did not click on you - only that
they did. Thus, you can know something's wrong, but not why.

And how are you going to improve if you don't know what's wrong?

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petercooper
In SEO that's a pretty common problem.

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Hoff
The bad guys know how to bypass this check.

It took seconds to figure out a way that could cloak malware against this AVG
check.

Malware is a problem.

This is not a solution.

This is another botnet.

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Xichekolas
Sounds like there is an easy solution to this problem... just block all IE6
users... kills two birds with one stone!

</tongue_in_cheek>

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Stabback
I'm actually building a web app with a small start up, and we just do not have
the time to make our service ie6 compatible. We are going to let users know
that and redirect them to a very plane jane site where you can still get the
information but not very efficiently. However our market is mainly tech savvy
people so it should work out.

~~~
Xichekolas
Just use the js widget on <http://www.savethedevelopers.org/> ... no sense
writing your own.

I'm also ignoring IE6, crappy old corporate computers be damned. It's just not
worth my sanity.

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Stabback
Sorry, that widget just gives that little dropdown redirecting to their site?
I meant that I was going to just provide an info page where the user can still
get the information on my site, just not in the same flashy page as everyone
else.

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ideamonk
AVG is an antivirus. When users install it, they give it full privileges. A
program like AVG Antivirus runs on many computers. Ofcourse this gives AVG
enormous power to affect ad market, not only will CTRs go down, but also if
AVG is corrupt, they can make auto clickers or have rival's ad income down by
a great extent, or eat up adsense impressions of rivals. I wonder why didn't
anyone think before implementing this.

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Hexstream
User-Agent information is _inherently_ unreliable. I don't see why people are
upset when a misguided practice that already provides false results with an
unknown margin of error gets even worse. If they insist on using such a metric
then it's their responsibility to assume the risks that it incurs.

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revicon
Google / Yahoo do this as well to check up on sites to make sure whats served
to their bots is the same as whats served to real users. Google has 3 or 4
different fake user agent strings they use for the googlebot

~~~
jonknee
Google doing it isn't nearly the same as 10 million users doing it. In fact,
this type of activity should be limited to search engines, not client-side
apps.

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gm
Any opinions on the best way to deal with this?

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avalanche
I think the solution should be fairly simple. Since AVG is not a real browser,
despite telling a web server that it is, it should be easy to craft a piece of
Javascript and cookie on a webpage that would return a proper result in a real
browser like IE, Firefox, Safari, or Opera. If a proper result is not
returned, then the web server can just do a 302 meta redirect to AVG's website
as mentioned earlier. If implemented widely on web servers (say as an apache
module or PHP patch) this, in effect, would cause AVG to become it's very own
DDoS attacker. I don't think they would want this, but it'll probably happen
if they don't re-think the way they do things.

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mleonhard
How would that work? The AVG robot probably only fetches the page's URL. By
the time you serve up a JavaScript, you've already lost the ability to
redirect the robot.

Also, once enough people start redirecting the AVG robot to the AVG website,
they'll just update the robot to ignore those redirects. It's antivirus
software so it gets updated very often.

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pmjordan
Presumably, AVG loads extra resources like images, CSS, iframes, <object>s
etc. from your page. (if it didn't, it wouldn't be very good at finding
malware, _and_ be really easy to detect)

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whatusername
actually - from skimming the article it appears that it doesn't.

