{"id":10534,"date":"2016-01-01T20:11:58","date_gmt":"2016-01-02T01:11:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/?p=10534"},"modified":"2016-01-01T20:11:58","modified_gmt":"2016-01-02T01:11:58","slug":"is-avg-an-antivirus-or-a-pup","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/is-avg-an-antivirus-or-a-pup\/","title":{"rendered":"Is AVG an Antivirus or a PUP?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Is AVG an Antivirus or a PUP?<\/h1>\n

The following article is from Ghacks<\/a><\/span>. We think you’ll find it interesting. Free antiviruses try to monetize their products – sometimes in ways that resemble malware or PUPs. When you consider your security, sometimes you get what you pay for… and in the case of AVG you paid nothing and get a whole lot you don’t need and probably don’t want.<\/p>\n

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AVG putting millions of Chrome users at risk<\/span><\/h1>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n<\/header>\n
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By<\/span> Martin Brinkmann<\/a><\/span><\/span> on<\/span> January 1, 2016<\/abbr> <\/span> in<\/span> Security<\/a><\/span> – Last Update: January 1, 2016<\/abbr> <\/i> 28<\/a><\/span><\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n
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Security company AVG, well known for its free and commercial security products that offer a wide range of security related safeguards and services, has put millions of Chrome users at risk recently by breaking Chrome security in a fundamental way in one of its extensions for the web browser.<\/p>\n

AVG, like many other security companies offering free products, is using different monetization strategies to earn revenue from its free offerings.<\/p>\n

One part of the equation are getting customers to upgrade to paid versions of AVG and for a while , that was the only way things worked for companies like AVG.<\/p>\n

The free version works fine on its own but is being used to advertise the paid version that is offering advanced features such as anti-spam or an enhanced firewall on top of that.<\/p>\n

\"avg<\/p>\n

Security companies started to add other revenue streams to their free offerings, and one of the most prominent one in recent time involved the creation of browser extensions and the manipulation of the browser’s default search engine, home page and new tab page that go along with it.<\/p>\n

Customers who install AVG software on their PC get a prompt in the end to safeguard their browsers. A click on ok in the interface installs AVG Web TuneUp<\/a> in compatible browsers with minimal user interaction.<\/p>\n

The extension has more than 8 million users according to the Chrome Web Store (according to Google’s own statistics nearly nine million).<\/p>\n

Doing so changes the home page, new tab page and default search provider in the Chrome and Firefox web browser if installed on the system.<\/p>\n

The extension that gets installed requests eight permissions including the permission to “read and change all data on all websites”, “mange downloads”, “communicate with cooperating native applications”, “managing apps, extensions and themes”, and changing home page, search settings and start page to a custom AVG search page.<\/p>\n

\"avg<\/p>\n

Chrome notices the changes and will prompt users offering to restore settings to their previous values if the changes made by the extension were not intended.<\/p>\n

Quite a few issues arise from installing the extension, for instance that it changes the startup setting to “open a specific page” ignoring the users choice (for instance to continue the last session).<\/p>\n

If that is not bad enough, it is quite difficult to modify changed settings without disabling the extension. If you check the Chrome settings after installation and activation of AVG Web TuneUp, you will notice that you cannot modify home page, start parameters or search providers anymore…<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Read the rest of this interesting and informative article here.<\/a><\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/section>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Is AVG an Antivirus or a PUP? The following article is from Ghacks. We think you’ll find it interesting. Free antiviruses try to monetize their products – sometimes in ways that resemble malware or PUPs. When you consider your security, sometimes you get what you pay for… and in the case of AVG you paid nothing and get\u2026 Read More »<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10534"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10534"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10534\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10535,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10534\/revisions\/10535"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10534"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10534"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10534"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}