Some users may not be aware of the following (it is mentioned on the avast help pages and elsewhere here):
This relates to the Web shield. The interface summary may say “Secured Your system is fully protected”. Click on Real time shields, Web shield, and at the bottom it says “Pages scanned/infected: (a number) / (a number)”
If the Web shield is enabled but the numbers are 0 / 0, it isn’t actually scanning the web - therefore you are not fully protected.
Now go into Settings (top right), updates, proxy settings, and make these match the settings you have in Control Panel, Internet options, connections, proxy server - then avast will scan the web. (refs here are to the v5 interface)
cookies, if you look at the Network shield you’ll find it scans Web content a lot more than the Web shield. I don’t really understand it but that seems to be how it works. But if you’re surfing the Web, the Web shield should at least show some files as scanned.
My webshield is working - I didn’t say it wasn’t. The point is that many users won’t realise theirs isn’t. It took me about 3 years use of v4 to find out, and v5 is no different. In my case, for some reason entering ‘localhost’ as proxy and 12080 as port, makes my webshield work. In v4 I couldn’t find a way of making it not use a proxy. At least this is now a clear option in v5.
Obviously anyone who uses a real external server as proxy, is already fully aware about setting proxy settings.
Thanks for your comments re Network shield. I imagine this scans LAN traffic for viruses in and out of the pc including pc to pc, whereas Web shield is probably dedicated to incoming only from the WAN.
The particular situation I had in mind was where the user isn’t using proxy settings, but Avast is set to automatically detect them (ie the settings are not wrong, they simply don’t exist). In that case it seems Webshield doesn’t operate, but it could detect that a proxy isn’t being used. Hope this helps.
