AVAST EMAIL SIGNATURE CONTAINS A BOT

Unbeknownst to me, I was happily polluting all my emails with the AVAST signature line. Well not quite true, I did see the AVAST signature when folks sent me reply emails and I initially thought hmmm maybe that is not so bad. GOOD for my email recipients to know that my emails are being scanned by AVAST and that there would be some level of risk management by accepting my emails.

Then today a learned IT person, asked me to remove the signature from any email I sent him. The reason being is that the signature ‘according to him’ contains a bot and that is ACTIVATED when someone touches the embedded link. When the signature gets touched it inserts a bot into memory and sends the wan ip address to their server and waits for instructions.

IS THIS TRUE?

If not illegal it certainly seem immoral?

This is something that has been there for absolutely years, it is easy enough to change, see attached image.

As far as I’m aware, no bot it is just a signature, the link is back to avast.com.

It doesn’t do anything unless you click it and in that case it basically says your visit to avast was as a result of the email signature of the avast email. Hovering over the link shows the full URL information, see attached image2 of this reference.