I have opera browser and webshield running, everything (except one thing) is running very well. Working great. Webshield blocked all my attempts to download the eicar to my machine, disconnecting me from the page, every site that I inserted in the url block of webshield is being blocked correctly, every page is being scanned as it should be…
The problem is… When I try to block the download of some files with certain extensions, the opera browser tottaly ignore it and allows me to download… What I did was go to the url blocking, and insert things like “.exe", ".scr”, “*.pif”, etc… When I made it and was using IE some time ago, all my tries to download files with this extensions using IE were blocked by webshield, that showed me that page telling me about the access denied by avast… But the same thing doesnt happend with opera… Even having the same settings in webshield… Anyone knows what could be?
Lets say that I want to block the following site http://www.superdownloads.com.br , if in url block (in webshield) I set up something like superdownloads, the site will be blocked as it should be.
But, if I set up sometthing like *.exe, *.pif, *.bat, *.scr , *.zip , all files with these extensions will be downloaded despite it is configured in url block (in webshield) to not allow the download.
It only happens in opera…
IE with this configuration in url block will not download any file, instead it will show the avast page “acess denied”.
I think the problem stems from how it is downloaded.
I recall having much the same conversation because I tried testing this using firefox with a small .exe file on a download/file share site (rapidshare, etc.), which would loosely be the same as how download.com would download a file.
You aren’t actually clicking on the .exe file, but a link to a page which kicks off the file download, this seems to bypass that url blocking path.
I don’t know if using the wild card you could enter .exe which would trap these type of downloads, but it would also trap other legitimate use of .exe in the URL, like some descriptions of malware on security sites.
e.g. securitysite.com\malwarename.exe.html
Why you are able to block with IE and not Opera (try firefox it will probably be the same) would tend to blow the above theory out of the water and indicate that there are differences in the way IE, opera and firefox handle ‘downloads.’
Well, I was testing more about this behavior and I find out that Opera just shows the download dialog box. After that, if you ask to save, it will NOT download the file…
Webshield works witha diferent behavior in Opera, while in FF and IE it shows a page telling that the file was blocked for download, in Opera it just doesnt download, without any warning.