As you all know, there are websites that are blacklisted by Avast, and when you try to connect to them it’ll stop the website from loading and you’ll get a pop up from Avast telling you that they blocked the connection.
One thing I have noticed is that after having Malwarebytes Free (which is just the on demand scanner and has no real time protection) open, even when closing it right after from the system tray, going to the blacklisted website doesn’t produce the Web shield alert from Avast. The website still doesn’t connect but it loads slowly. However, when I use the Eicar.org test website, the web shield alert still works properly.
It’s only when I go to run an Avast repair from its Apps & Features uninstall Menu that the alert on the blacklisted website appears again.
I have run this experiment a few times to see that there is some interaction with Malwarebytes and Avast that is causing this. EDIT: Maybe not. See below updates.
I thought this was notable enough to bring to attention, in case anyone else uses both products, and for the Avast team to look into. I brought this up on the Malwarebytes forums too.
Just noticed that, post Avast repair and without MB being opened, Avast’s web shield didn’t produce the alert on the blacklisted website before doing so a few minutes later. After the 10 minute reset (which I allowed for in my previous tests), it produces the block alert again.
So it may not be Malwarebytes, as that wouldn’t make sense. But the timing is still coincidental, so i’ll keep monitoring.
Ok so I don’t know if this is due to Malwarebytes (I can start a new topic if needed), but after monitoring it a bit the web shield can be hit or miss with regards to blocking some websites. It appears to always block the eicar.org test web link which is good, but there are some others that I have tried on my own that Avast has marked as either URL:Blacklist or URL:Scam that aren’t always blocked by the web shield. Sometimes I will get the pop up from Avast saying the connection was terminated, but it will still load the website anyway. This is already factoring in the 10 minute wait that appears to be needed in between blocks of the same website. I have tried running repairs on Avast here and there to see if it does anything, and there’s some coincidental timing that suggests that does work, but nothing conclusive.
This is only something that has been happening over the last couple of days. I don’t want to keep testing the shield with real websites (unlike the EICAR website) because, while i’m sure the couple I have been using are relatively harmless and I still have Chrome’s Browsing security enabled, I don’t want to run the risk of exposing my computer to potentially harmful links or pages.
I know that one of the things being worked on in the latest Beta for 24.1 is Improved web shield performance. So I don’t know if this is one of the things that’s being improved on, but I thought I would still bring this up.