Protection against drive-by downloads?

Has anyone any thoughts on the effectiveness of Avast and, in particular, Web Shield in preventing drive-by malware downloads or their effects?

This appears to be the greatest single hazard on the Internet, what with so many ‘trusted’ sites now reportedly being infected with the tacit acquiescence of the operators of those web sites whether through carelessness or incompetence.

I have found Web Shield to be very effective. I don’t know how many times I have been warned that a site has been blocked. I don’t go to weird sites but have gotten bad links or mistyped URLs.

Since reinstalling Avast 8 I hadn’t had a Web Shield Alert until yesterday when I was checking an okay sites old links. One of them had been infected and Avast warned me and blocked the threat.

The web shield is very hot on detecting hacked sites, finding inserted/injected malicious code or redirects to run other code and it is hacked sites that are more likely to be the reason for a drive-by download/exploit attempt. The network shield also checks the access to other sites against its known malicious sites list, not to forget the avast script shield.

So all in all avast has relatively good drive-by download protection. Just browse the viruses and worms forum looking for URL:MAL this is avast blocking access to a site which is considered malicious and that is usually the Web Shield and network shield malicious sites list combined.

This protection can be enhanced in the browser you use, in firefox, the NoScript and RequestPolicy add-ons prevent scripts running on the site when you first arrive at a site.

NoScript stops all scripts until you give permission to run scripts for that domain, it is also blocking script access to other sites that are linked to in that web page. The RequestPolicy add-on is a cross site scripting (XSS) prevention tool (noscript also does this but in a limited way), that only allows scripts from 3rd party sites to run if you give express permission. These two add-ons are pretty good at preventing drive-by anything.

The RequestPolicy add-on is more noisy/intrusive (read, requires much more user interaction allowing permissions,etc.) as websites now may have a lot of 3rd party site links in their web pages.

Thank you for those comments David.

Completely true what DavidR states here. Even better news here - there are three avast! Shields involved. There is the avast! Web Shield, the avast! Network Shield and the avast Script Shield, every user of the avast resident av solution should have those shields up and running as an important layer of added defenses against drive-by-downloads and a lot of other malcode involved.

What our forum friend DavidR tells you about No Script and Request Policy extension protection also is true, this is fullproof protection lest the appropriate settings were chosen and when you allow the main site temporarily for website functionality from that main site this protection is rock solid against known and even download script that have not even been dreamt up by malcreants. NoScript was a brilliant concept as Giorgio Maone the developer created it and Request Policy also a marvellous creation for that matter,

polonus

You’re welcome.