At seemingly random times, Avast will pop up a warning notification accompanied by a startling and often loud “DING DING DING!! THREAT HAS BEEN DETECTED”. Sometimes it comes up when I am playing a game, or watching a video, or when I am broadcasting live and it is quite annoying. Sometimes I have the overall volume turned up in case the game or video audio is hard to hear, and this thing will come on suddenly and rape my ears.
My issue here is not what is causing it. My issue is being unable to make it stop! I tick the “Do not show this message again” option in the notification popup, but that doesn’t work. It’ll still happen again later. Even under the Network Shield section in the main interface I have UNticked “Show warning messages”, and it still pops up.
I’ve posted this on the forums before, but everybody was focused on trying to remove the “threat”. Regardless of what anybody might recommend, I’m really not concerned about that. I just want Avast to stop announcing that.
However, in case it helps in some way, the notficiation says “Exploit Blocked” and the object in question is my IP address. It says the infection was some DCOM Exploit and it tells me that, whatever it was, it was blocked.
I understand that for security reasons I should figure out what that exploit is and try to make it not happen in the future, but as I said, the issue I’m addressing here is avast’s inability to suppress the messages despite the checkbox settings for doing so.
Any explanations?
EDIT: I’ve disabled DCOM on my computer so that should keep Avast a little quieter, though there was another thing that caused the popup as well. Remember, though, the issue I’m reporting here is that avast won’t be quiet even if I tell it to… not how to remove the threats.
Disabling DCOM won’t make any difference (as you have found) as that is a local system setting and that won’t stop the ‘external’ DCOM exploit attempts.
What is your firewall ?
DCOM Attacks are speculative, not targeted and tries to exploit a vulnerability in out of date OS, if your OS is up to date then you aren’t vulnerable to the exploit. That doesn’t stop them (usually someone from the same ISP with an infected computer) trying to see if it can infect others.
Your firewall should be the first line of defence in this, but avast also monitors common attack ports using the Network Shield, ideally the firewall should block it and avast wouldn’t know about it, but for whatever reason avast is first in line over your firewall.
I don't know why you are still getting the messages if you have unchecked the Show warning messages, unfortunately there are no other user settings in the avast 5.0 network shield.
So we really get down to the point of ensuring your firewall is the first in line on your defence as that should stop them silently (not removing the threat, as that really is outside your control as the attacks are random and speculative) .
####
I wouldn't recommend turning off all sounds as that is across all avast functions.
I noticed. I disabled DCOM as another site suggested but later still got the notification from avast. Sigh. I was in the living room watching Eureka with my wife when we heard it from the computer room. Nice.
I use a router, so I thought I’d try to configure that to be more secure. I went to grc.com’s Shields Up service to help me do this. Wasn’t sure how to explicitly block a port, but I went to Advanced Filtering and saw that I could tell the router to reject connections at certain ports. I started by testing port 135, the RPC thing, according to grc.com. Says windows uses it but I should block it with a firewall. I told the router to reject connections and now whenever I go to the advanced filtering page on the router config, the router reboots itself. Very odd. (i think the only thing I can do is reset all to defaults on the router and try something else).
I guess I’ll just have to figure it out.
As far as avast not suppressing the messages, perhaps I should uninstall/reinstall? I may try that. After all, I don’t need to see these messages. Avast is doing its job and blocking whatever is happening…
I have exactly the same problem as vertigoelectric. I still get the annoying Network Shield warnings splashed on my screen even though I’ve opted to turn off the warnings. Any ideas someone?
Mine stopped popping up a couple of weeks ago. It must have been the last major program update or something. However, even though the popups were suppressed, the voice audio still announced “A THREAT HAS BEEN DETECTED”, which was more annoying than the visual popup. I simply disabled the sounds for that one.