I don’t use Avast Web Shield any more because on many video sharing sites, it blocks the entire website or blocks some videos on those sites. When I add Exceptions or report false positives to Avast, more and more video sites or components are blocked. When I tried other antivirus, they don’t block these sites.
Perhaps Avast depends on community reporting which is dependent on the intentions of those reporting. Avast should make its Web Shield useful again by using databases used by other AVs or investigate before blocking.
Please modify your https: links to hXXps: as I have done in your quote to make these sites unclickable. Unsuspecting users may not know these links may be malicious.
Using a sandbox, I initiated 2 separate alert for 2 sites.
My point is that these sites are NOT malicious. They are just video sites. Just that Avast Web Shield says they are and you believe that. I’m now using another AV which doesn’t block them and I can watch my videos and movies in peace.
No point discussing this as Avast Web Shield practically flags most video sites as malicious.
Wouldn’t you want an antivirus to stop an infection at a video site put there surreptitiously by a hacker or nation-agent and the video website owner is unaware of a 0-exploit of their software being exploited? Couldn’t you be at risk of being infected as collateral damage?
If someone put a malware into a file on Google Drive or MS OneDrive, it is good for Web Shield to detect it. But because of one or a few malware, is Avast going to block these drives totally making them unusable.
Also, as I said, I used another reputable AV and it sometimes blocks a script here and there without blocking the site or the video.
Even if Web Shield doesn’t block the malware, File Shield will detect it if downloaded and deal with it.
My point is that Avast Web Shield is overkill in dealing with video sites. It needs to adopt recognised malware lists instead of relying on someone to report the sites. That someone may have ulterior motives.
It would seem that you are objecting to one antivirus blocking something you want to freely view, (it’s very annoying, I know) whereas another antivirus does not block and that would seem to work the way you think all antivirus programs should work.
The people at Avast who actually do the work (And it is not us, us Evangelists. We are just here to use our knowledge to help other users.) are looking out for you and everyone else and use their professional training to protect all of us from harm. In a perfect world there would be no malware, but this world is imperfect and there actors out there that live to inflict harm on our systems, commit ransomware, and cause misery and worse.
Some of us have devices that enable us to live, and if these devices are compromised, their lives are at risk, even death is possible. I have to say, do they really care?
Yes, there are false positives because it is an imperfect world, but don’t throw the baby out the bath water. Keep the baby and keep your system alive, to live another day.
I don’t work for avast and only the Avast Virus Team are the only ones that could:
A: list is as URL Blacklist.
B: investigate this and remove or retain the detection.
In all honesty I feel the OP is fighting this in the topic, instead of reporting it to Avast for analysis
Note: You will notice that Avast isn’t listed on the VT results, as Avast only does live scans (not on-demand) for websites.
I have for months reported this and that video site to Avast. One time, they removed lulustream from blacklist but later added it back. Also, no point reporting as Avast kept on blocking more and more video sites, faster than we can report them.
I checked this Forum and found other complaints about Avast Web Shield on video sites like this one:
Pirated content could bring more than just a video.
Posting a link to a topic from 2013 isn’t great. In this topic there are also some that tried to investigate this and found no problem viewing the content.
All you say at this post and others at this thread about piracy or serve content that otherwise should be paid, talk than avast besides an AV also wotk as police and moralist
That isn’t what I’m saying, avast isn’t blocking content because it thinks it is piracy, but because Avast has the site is on its URL:Blacklist.
Why would have to be taken up with them
I try my best to avoid piracy video sites because it may contain malware. But because Avast blocked so many video sites, I thought Avast is also an anti-piracy tool. Thanks, DavidR, for the clarification.