I’ve been a user of avast for a year now and avast home edition didn’t give any problems as such .
Recently i upgraded to avast free . i did get a few problems installing avast 5 , but was finally able to complete the installation after searching for answers through the forum…
I used to test my antivirus web shield at EICAR web site ie www dot eicar dot org.Here
a fake malware file is available which can be used to test the functioning of web shield .
While avast home edition (4.8) used to detect both http and the https traffic , the recent avast free is unable to detect the transfer of the (fake test)file only in secure https .
IS this happening in my computer only or is the web shield built like that…?
It isn’t that it is unable to, it doesn’t even try, that is the whole purpose of HTTPS (secure encrypted) traffic, to keep prying eyes out including your anti-virus.
Avast 4.8 is no different in this regard it didn’t monitor HTTPS traffic in the web shield either.
In both avast 5 and 4.8 depending on the file type it may well be scanned by the File System/Standard Shields respectively.
The web shield redirects http port 80 traffic into its proxy to scan it, no other protocols or ports.
@sgrao: the webshield monitors web traffic in memory, not at hard disk level. HTTPS means ssl traffic (encrypted), and there’s no way the web shield can monitor unreadable data. This data will only become readable once decrypted at hard disk level by your browser security components (certificates). Then only the file system shield (remaining the main resident shield btw) can analyse it.