A site with a good EEAT is blocked by Avast

General Topics
1

Hi.
The site is young, it was created on September 28, 2024. The site is dedicated to the book Math Bitcoin Price Prediction: 2030, 2040, 2050 by Andrey Ignatenko. The book is available on Amazon, from September 26, 2024. You can find it, this is not an advertisement. But I publish the link to the domain, so that there are no questions: math-bitcoin-predictions com

For almost a month the site worked without problems. This morning (UTC+3, Ukraine) there was a press release about the book. And this afternoon the site was blacklisted by Avast. At first the warning was only from the Avast Online Security & Privacy browser extension, but later the desktop application started showing the threat and blocking the site.

I wrote 5 times here: false-positive-file-form.php

I decided to make a post on the forum. Maybe this will help?
I scanned the site with Virustotal - one warning from CRDF, otherwise everything is fine.
My hosting does not show any malicious codes. And I haven’t installed any plugins in over a week. But the problem happened just today when the press release came out.

I have 2 questions:

  1. Is it possible to remove the blacklist today?
  2. Why did this happen?

All information on the site is real, not fake. All links are working, including social profiles and scientific profiles. Moreover, the book has real scientific reviews by PhDs in Economics, their social pages also have these reviews.

I can list thousands of sites that don’t have even a 10th of such EEAT, but they are not on the blacklist.

Please fix the problem. Thanks in advance.
There are no active links because I’m not allowed to post them. Sorry for the inconvenience.

2

Avast won’t respond directly to you - but should investigate the site within 48 hours.

If they find it to be a false positive it will be removed from the database. If after that time period it is still detected they must still consider it suspect.

Whilst there is still only one at virus total - I have run some other scans.
Some security related pointers give here - Website test: math-bitcoin-predictions.com
Whilst considered a Low Security Risk here - Website test: math-bitcoin-predictions.com there are other Hardening Improvements given.
Considered a Minimal Security Risk here - Quttera - Detailed Malware Scan Report - there are a lot of external 3rd party links which could impact the site.

These may or may not have an impact in the Avast Detection. Since you don’t give a screenshot of the Avast Alert window with the Details option shown it is hard to pint down the cause.
So I paid it a visit - see attached image.

Note I don’t work for avast, but a long term Avast user.

b9974

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3

Thanks for the screenshot. Yes, that’s it. And it’s the same for https. I have automatic redirects to https, i.e. the site is only accessible via https with SSL.
I’ve seen the DNSSEC error. If that is the problem, I will fix it. But I am not sure if that is the problem. Because DNSSEC was never enabled at all, and the blacklist happened today, not even a week ago.
So why today? If getting clarification on what exactly to fix, I would fix it.

4

Unfortunately not working for Avast, I can’t say exactly why it was blocked - only someone from the virus labs team could answer that.

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5

All I have to do is write in a false positive report… It’s a very unpleasant situation. Can Avast representatives give an explanation? Or do they not answer here at all?

6

Yes you need to submit a False Positive report for the virus labs team to check it out.

Some time ago you used to get an email reply to your submission, unfortunately that is no longer the policy only that it will be checked out within 48hrs. Many regular forum members believe this should continue as it is likely to result in more FP reports on the same site.

7

I’ll be patient. There’s nothing else I can do. But I’ve disabled Force HTTPS in the site settings. That’s the only technical change I’ve made in the last week.

I read on the internet that force redirection to HTTPS can sometimes be considered a threat. If this is the problem, it should be resolved. If the problem is a large number of links due to a press release, then it’s a very bad policy.

8

I’m sorry I can’t do more, as Avast User I’m limited in what I can do.

In most cases it is pointing people in the right direction.

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9

It’s been 48 hours since I first contacted Avast.
What I did to solve the problem:

  1. Removed forced HTTPS.
  2. Removed caching of static files in the browser.
  3. Removed Google Analytics.
  4. Wrote about 10 times in false-positive-file-form.php

Bottom line:

  1. No response from Avast, even though I specified my email.
  2. There are no requirements to remove my site from the blacklist.

Question: is this problem solvable at all?

If there are no requirements and explanations, then it is a biased attitude towards the site, which spoils reputation and causes intentional monetary harm.

10

I’m happy to report that https://math-bitcoin-predictions.com IS SAFE according to Avast desktop antivirus and browser extension.

It’s been over 48 hours, but the guys at the website testing lab have done their job. I hope that the issues raised in this thread will benefit all people who are looking for reasons why Avast antivirus blacklisted an URL.

From my point of view, forced HTTPS and forced caching of files in the user’s browser can be considered a security threat. Therefore, you should not enable all the features on a Wordpress site. Some of them should be marked as insecure, but this is a question for the developers of these plugins.

As for Google Analytics, I have read on the internet that it is good practice to get the user’s consent to use not only cookies but also Google Analytics. For now, I have disabled GA, and I have seen an increase in the loading speed of the site. Someday, I will enable it again, but right now I don’t have time to develop additional user consent items.

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11

Thanks for the confirmation.

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