Avast proxy (sometimes) blocking own IP. Reason?

Avast Mac Security
1

Hey

Not sure if this belongs into the Mac subforum, or the general Avast forum (since it could be a general behavior of Avast, not just the Mac version). Anyway, posting it here now, hope that’s okay.

Avast program version: 11.9

OS: OSX 10.11.5

Avast settings:

  • File Shield: enabled.
  • Mail shield: enabled (but effectively unused, since I don’t use a mail client)
  • Web shield: enabled, but secured connections are not scanned.

The problem:

I noticed that Console regularly (maybe 10, 20 times per day) logs messages like:

com.avast.proxy[337]: Error connecting to [own IP]: Operation timed out

and

com.avast.proxy[271]: Error connecting to [own IP]: Connection refused

… where “[own IP]” is my own IP :wink:

So I’m wondering what’s the cause for that. And also, why in some cases it “refuses”, while in other cases the reported error is a time out.

Any ideas how to investigate this further?

2

Hi,
This is the right forum, the Avast for Windows webshield and the Mac webshield are two completely different programs.

The reason why you get those log messages is that some program is doing a connection to a local socket on which there
is no running listener. As “com.avast.proxy” handles only HTTP(S), IMAP(S) and POP3(S) connections, it must be one of those
ports. I would guess that it is HTTP(S) but the origin is hard to say without more info. However it is nothing uncommon that
I would care about, the message is there only for debugging purposes.