AVG Fakes User Agent, Floods the Internet
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 web sites with meaningless traffic; on Slashdot, they're seeing them as 6% of their page traffic now. Best of all, they change their UA to avoid being filtered by web sites who are seeing massive increases in bandwidth from worthless robots — via Slashdot

Comments
Posted by: Lloyd Borrett | 20 July 2008