I made the mistake of loading the free Avast antivirus software based on the recommendation of InfoWorld. Over a couple of months I have had several instances of being dissatisfied with this software. It does achieve a high level of protection, but it does so at the cost of an astronomical rate of false positives – and the version currently loaded (the one before the newest) has apparently removed both the function to report a false positive (not that Avast ever actually paid any attention to those reports) and the ability to deactivate Avast. As a matter of a fact, I will be uninstalling Avast right after I reboot to regain control of my system because none of the system calls are currently working due to Avast.
Avast blocks access to websites that are known to be 100% clean & safe. Avast blocks installation of well known, highly rated programs. And, most importantly, Avast no longer allows the user to override any of these ridiculous errors.
I’m sorry, but your software is NOT smarter than I am. Your software is here to help me maintain security, but it is not here to prevent me from using my computer.
Based on your mesage, I’d say you’re exaggerating it by a lot. Every AV has false positives and from my experience avast! has the least of them. There are occalsional hiccups with Evo-Gen that might trigger at benign things, but this is 100% machine generated signature based on past malware so things like thi will happen. And they get fixed on their own or if you report it.
Also, how do you know a webpage is known and clean? Sure it may be known based on URL address, but that doesn’t absilutely mean it is clean. We’ve seen tons of malware injected through ads used on otherwise known clean webpages. Sometimes reputable webpages get hacked and they start distributing malware. I’ve never seen avast! blocking entire reputable page, it was always just a specific URL from it. But it may blacklist entire domain if enough users get different infections from it. I know they have such systems in place, then it’s all abut thresholds that trigger this.
Granted, reporting false positive through avast! seems to be the least effective and slow process. Reporting it here on forums usually gives them top priority so if you report them here, they’ll be fixed the quickest.
You can pause protection through tray icon or individual modules through settings. Understand that out of 230 million users avast! has, very small percentage of users are advanced users like us so handing them the control over protection will mean they’ll disable avast! at any event of avast! preventing them from executing a file, even if it’s really a malware. I’ve seen countless cases where users disabled avast! just because they were so desperate in running the file which later turned out to actualyl be malware. It’s a psychological thing and there is no easy solution to satisfy all users. Disabling of protection and exclusions have to be burried in settings enough that are easily accessible by advanced users, but deep enough that average Joe won’t use it every time avast! detects something. That would kinda defeat the purpose of an antivirus, wouldn’t it?
You’re free to use other solutions, but I can tell you from my personal experience, you’ll soon be back to avast! because other solutions are even more clumsy to control and they produce far more stupid false positives on even more stupid things. And I’ve tried pretty much every free solution in existence.
In earlier i use Emsisoft anti-malware.But it can’t protect me from phishing sites and viruses like they used two full antivirus engines bitdefender and emsisoft own cloud and promised it will 100% protect computers from virus and malwares but fail to protect me.Then i found Avast! and it’s free product.It change my world.I use a second opinion scaner of Emsisoft (Occasonally).I am a proud user of avast! free antivirus,it saved my computer and my privacy too.Long live Avast!.One thing nothing is 100% in this world.But avast! keep tring hard to protect user like us
On detection of files, most of the products obtained over 99% in specialized laboratories tests. A result to moderate Avast, excellent in detection, is often cited for its tendency to increase the number of false positives.
the pretty inevitable source : AV comparative
summary statement
ESET had 1 false alarm.
Trend Micro had 1 false alarm.
Panda had 3 false alarms.
Fortinet had 6 false alarms.
Sophos had 8 false alarms.
Tencent had 8 false alarms.
Bitdefender had 9 false alarms
Kaspersky Lab had 9 false alarms.
McAfee had 10 false alarms.
AVG had 14 false alarms.
Emsisoft had 16 false alarms.
BullGuard had 19 false alarms.
eScan had 19 false alarms.
F-Secure had 19 false alarms.
Lavasoft had 19 false alarms.
Quickheal had 28 false alarms.
AVIRA had 44 false alarms
Vipre had 50 false alarms.
Avast had 77 false alarms.
Baidu had 94 false alarms.
I find it strange you say that avast is one of the least (to report FP)while he is at the front bottom of the table (with 77 reports) … I repeat it’s only a look about FP , not global advice about avast.And as far I’m concerned , I experience too several FP with avast.
except that your test with this source is the number (1) and not comparative.
Look simply others, many of which are “0” others as “1” and few have more than “1”.So avast is also here at the bottom, somehow
I do not trust your source in the same way => misinterpretation or not significant enough test.
Overall,the politics have their own way of interpreting the statistics, sellers have theirs , technicians have theirs … and the end user also has his own , so …
Edit:
However, I would add about false positives moderating me that obviously, nothing is permanently frozen in time, and that indeed it did a few months avast is quiet in the FP detection, the big difference the beginning of the year where detections were almost daily (for my own use)
Funny you mention AV-C false positive scores. Panda AV that has one of the least FP’s made more of them in 1 week than I ever had FP’s with avast. And I tend to use suspicious stuff like No-CD patches, old software and games etc…
On my personal use of avast in over eleven years, I think that users real world experiences on FPs are going to differ greatly from what is thrown at an AV in these tests.
