Mozilla and Opera remove Avast extensions from their add-on stores

https://palant.de/2019/12/03/mozilla-removes-avast-extensions-from-their-add-on-store-what-will-google-do/

by robin_reala • 7 years ago

305 94 7 years ago

jefft255• 7 years ago

Modern antivirus software, to me, feels like a virus. Norton and McAffee are especially guilty of this. They install browsers toolbar, do search engine hijacking, constant nagging. They became the software they were supposed to protect us against. I finally convinced my dad not to renew his Norton subscription.

romanovcode• 7 years ago

Windows 10 has pretty good anti-virus built in.

hackbinary• 7 years ago

Yes, it is called Windows Defender, as above.

dessant3• 7 years ago

Windows Defender is a performant alternative to all the junk antivirus companies put out. At this point it's fairly well documented that having a third-party antivirus product running on your Windows device often exposes you to security issues, even if the antivirus doesn't spy on you.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/ex-top-mozilla-dev-to-windows-...

alibert• 7 years ago

"Windows Defender is a performant alternative ..."

No it's not really [1]. You can check by yourself running `npm install` of any medium sized project or if you are a gamer, launch Steam with/out Defender.

Even IntelliJ warns you about Defender performance impact in the IDE.

[1] https://www.av-comparatives.org/tests/performance-test-octob...

workthrowaway• 7 years ago

haven't had to install an anti-virus or deal with a virus in like forever. windows 10 kept nagging me about scanning, and often doesn't find much. i may not know what new tricks malwares and viruses are using right now.

benbristow2• 7 years ago

Windows Defender doesn't seem to do very well in AV tests

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sE-xdb9hTqY

Avast! did much better

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=km4aKjA2T_c

travisporter• 7 years ago

Norton is sad, because isn't their security team excellent at reporting vulnerabilities?

smacktoward• 7 years ago

The modern products sold under the Norton brand are a slur on the name of Peter Norton, a real dude who made some excellent software products and wrote some important books back in the day.

https://www.technologizer.com/2014/06/05/where-have-you-gone...

I guess there's a lesson here: if you sell your name, eventually it will be used for something that will tarnish it.

dirkf• 7 years ago

Take a look at the other articles from the same author where he investigated some popular anti-virus products. In particular Kaspersky is/was a mess:

- https://palant.de/2019/08/19/kaspersky-in-the-middle-what-co...

- https://palant.de/2019/11/25/kaspersky-the-art-of-keeping-yo...

- https://palant.de/2019/11/26/internal-kaspersky-api-exposed-...

- https://palant.de/2019/11/27/assorted-kaspersky-vulnerabilit...

McAfee:

- https://palant.de/2019/12/02/rendering-mcafee-web-protection...

And I expect that he will publish more articles in the future.

If you want to use anti-virus I would stick to their on-access scanning and stay away from their web protection...

Abishek_Muthian2• 7 years ago

I would like to have a low power ARM box just for scanning files, like PiHole but for AV but I think it would be limited only to Clam AV; does any other AV support linux on ARM(not android)?

bscphil• 7 years ago

More very entertaining evidence of how terrible most antivirus products are can be found be reading many of the Project Zero bug reports by taviso. https://bugs.chromium.org/p/project-zero/issues/list?q=owner... There are a lot of them!

jcranmer• 7 years ago

Modern antivirus software, to me, feels like a virus.

Malware can be loosely defined as any software which tries to modify the system to inject capabilities not previously present. With that definition, antivirus is malware that tries to prevent other malware from doing what it did.

dessant3• 7 years ago

Malware is not defined by what it does, but whether or not its actions conform to user intent and approval.

SketchySeaBeast• 7 years ago

any software which tries to modify the system to inject capabilities not previously present

Isn't that just software?

andybak• 7 years ago

Malware can be loosely defined as any software which tries to modify the system to inject capabilities not previously present.

Very loosely.

zzma• 7 years ago

They also will often install their own trusted root certificate and then MITM all HTTP/HTTPS connections. Often, this MITM will significantly reduce the cryptographic security of the connection over the public internet [1].

[1] https://jhalderm.com/pub/papers/interception-ndss17.pdf

chooseaname• 7 years ago

I never understood why this was a problem MS never felt they needed to address in the OS itself (architecturally). At this point, AV software should be obsolete. But, here we are.

munchbunny2• 7 years ago

They do and have done it for many years. But it’s hard (impossible) to stop a user from (being tricked into) downloading some random crap and insisting on running it despite warnings about untrusted executables and warnings about the executable asking for administrator permissions.

sectiondetail• 7 years ago

I think Microsoft's engineers would love to, and do wherever possible. But Windows' #1 selling point is backwards-compatibility. It's possible that there's types of security hardening that simply can't be done without breaking large swathes of legacy business software.

WorldMaker• 7 years ago

Also, Microsoft has been bundling AV as an OS feature for a while now. A lot of damage was done by the US anti-trust judgment declaring AV to not be an OS feature, and for Microsoft needing to wait for that judgment to expire to bundle the feature (which is why it was a separate download for Windows XP, and why so many people still don't realize Windows 10 has AV built-in and 3rd Party options are unnecessary at best [and can be scams at worst]).

jayflux• 7 years ago

“Modern” ? Antiviruses have been doing all those things you listed for the past 15 years, these tactics are as old as the hill.

I can’t remember a point when antivirus software didn’t do all that and just did the one job you wanted it to do. Since my school years I’ve always had to switch all that crap off

roywiggins2• 7 years ago

An apparent incompatibility between the mandated antivirus and Windows Subsystem for Linux means that I can't run WSL on my work machine. Something to do with the on-write virus scanning means running rsync in WSL will reliably BSOD the machine.

AnIdiotOnTheNet• 7 years ago

I would say that AV could be generously described as snake-oil pretty much since its inception. It has always caused more trouble than it ever prevented and was only capable of catching common low-effort malware, and even then only if said malware wasn't a "product" of some ad company that had a relationship with the AV vendor. Meanwhile it caused issues for legitimate software, slowed things down, and sometimes just acted as a new attack vector.

pragnesh• 7 years ago

why gdpr law does not apply to them ?

dessant3• 7 years ago

It does, but people rarely take the time to report illegal behavior that they encounter online.

allendoerfer• 7 years ago

Mozilla's mission is to build a better internet. In my opinion, they should totally use legal measures to do that. I would take part in crowdfunding it.

literallycancer2• 7 years ago

Since GDPR enforcement is done on a national level, the effectiveness of reporting offenders varies quite a lot depending on where you are from.

Nextgrid2• 7 years ago

I've reported dozens of violations to the ICO (UK) and have yet to see any investigations, let alone fines being applied.

hirako20002• 7 years ago

Avast even does some browser trickery to then be able to inspect tls/ssl packets. Not sure how I noticed that on a windows machine, but the owner was glad to uninstall it. As said on other comments, the built-in windows 10 defender AV is the least evil software to have enabled for somewhat a protected endpoint.

The situation is desperate for AV publishers, they treat customers like sheeps, the parallel with mafia ain't too far possible to make.

It sorts of reminds me 20 years back when it was common discussion to have on how AV publishers first deployed a number of viruses to create a market.

The war for a decent form of cyber security and privacy is being lost. It's getting worse every year. More money (billions) is poured into it. To no avail.

I think we got to seriously show the example and reject closed source solutions all together, stay away from centralized providers, question everything we consume. The crowed will eventually follow.

joobus• 7 years ago

I was forced to install this by my company on my mac. Avast breaks ssl/tls certification, and in a browser with avast, every website is reported as having an Avast cert. They basically mitm all browser traffic.

hirako20002• 7 years ago

This shinannigan can be diabled btw. It's just On by default.

Quite concerning a company forcing you to install this on an OS that has so little need for AV altogether.

52-6F-62• 7 years ago

I see your Avast and raise you McAfee protection on everything. Thankfully we were able to remove it. It was literally destroying the machine (do anything it considers a risky process and it would crank the CPU to 99% and start to melt the thing) and rendering it unusable.

mr_toad• 7 years ago

I see this all the time on corporate desktops, but on your own hardware? I’d point blank refuse. I’d rather just not use it for work.

btown• 7 years ago

For details: https://blog.avast.com/2015/05/25/explaining-avasts-https-sc...

AznHisoka2• 7 years ago

SimilarWeb have similar extensions doing essentially the same thing. this stuff has been going on for well over 5 years but Google has done nothing about it.

a3n• 7 years ago

Professional courtesy.

AznHisoka2• 7 years ago

Is something similarweb doesn’t have. I know.

bad_user• 7 years ago

I don't even understand why people use antivirus software. Sure, if you're on an ancient version of your OS, like Windows XP, then it might serve some purpose, but assuming modern versions of these operating systems, antivirus software does more harm than good.

Worried about browser extensions?

Another problem is that popular antivirus software are also installing their own root certificate so they can MITM secure HTTPS connections.

For example Bitdefender is able to inspect and modify your Google search result without installing a browser extension. And this is a common practice. See for example:

https://blog.hboeck.de/archives/869-How-Kaspersky-makes-you-...

degenerate• 7 years ago

If you are computer savvy, you understand the danger of opening "free_netflix.exe" from an ad you clicked, but the majority of people do not. There are still good 3rd party antivirus that stay out of the way, as an example I have been running Panda Antivirus (free edition) for a few years and often forget it's installed until I pop in an infected USB or try to open a questionable exe (such as a game mod patcher). If you have lots of click-happy family members, 3rd party antivirus is a must. Just stay away from the big names (Norton, Kaspersky, Avast, AVG, McAfee, etc). I used to run NOD32 but it started becoming a memory hog in ~2015.

jermaustin1• 7 years ago

If you have lots of click-happy family members, 3rd party antivirus is a must.

I HAD lots of click-happy family members, but as soon as I stopped fixing their computers and just formatting them, they stopped being so click happy.

autoexec• 7 years ago

While people can avoid a lot of problems with a little common sense, infections don't just come from click happy users. Malware in ads can infect users just for browsing to a site and popular sites like CNN and yahoo have infected users in the past that way. I've managed to convince most of my family and friends to install ad-blockers but some of them still don't. I've tried to encourage the more tech savvy among them to disable javascript by default as well, but most have not.

JetSpiegel• 7 years ago

You can have your cake and it eat by installing an Ad blocker. Win win

kryogen1c• 7 years ago

I don't even understand why people use antivirus software.

I don't understand how you can be even the littlest bit technically literate and not know several answers to this question

1) legitimate software you normally use gets compromised. See ccleaner

2) in the IoT era, there are multiple ingress and lateral move pivot points in networks, like smart tvs

3) aside from malware, there are lots of PUPs that get bundled and eventually end up on computers

4) phishing is still a thing. Legitimate email accounts get compromised (database breaches, eg) and _people you know_ can send you viruses that look barely out of the ordinary. It happened to my users today

Even if you have gateway/hardware antivirus, defense in depth is still a thing. Dont ever tell people not to have anti-virus, thats terrible advice

lousken2• 7 years ago

How did we end up here? Antimalware companies turning into spyware ones? And how is this even legal? Just the fact that they add privacy policy makes it legal?

Zelphyr• 7 years ago

Everybody (except, unfortunately for the moment, our government it seems) has realized just how valuable personal data is. That's turning not only antimalware companies into spyware companies but also search engines, TV manufactuers, etc... I don't think it's really going to change much until we as consumers really start to push back.

Sadly, I don't see that happening anytime soon because anytime I mention it to non-techical family and friends the reply I get back is a near unanimous shrug and some mumbling about their not having anything to hide. Of course, inevitably this evolves into them complaining incredulously about their phone listening to them "because so and so talked about such and such product the other day and I NEVER talk about that but when I got home all I saw were ads for that product and how dare they?!" My forehead hurts from frustratedly banging it against the wall.

gregjw• 7 years ago

What's with all of these unethical antivirus companies infringing privacy for a profit? Surely they're becoming exactly what they're trying to combat..

skocznymroczny2• 7 years ago

It's possible that they're trying to reach new markets. The environment nowadays is much safer than it was 10 years ago. Java applets are dead, Flash is dying, and adblocks are common. Outside of few specific security holes, Javascript sandbox is working well and protecting users from drive-by attacks.

USB/CDs are not as common as in the past, so people don't spread viruses from one machine to another. P2P networks and torrents are also less popular because of the wide availability of legal content at low prices.

Ceezy• 7 years ago

Farewell!!! How this stuff is even possible?

aba_cz4• 7 years ago

Jumpshot (https://www.jumpshot.com/) is created, owned and operated by Avast (same people sitting in the same offices using same data/servers). 100% of data use for the analytics is provided by that browser plugin. Nothing is anonymized. They (Jumpshot) have unique user/hardware id, url, referrer, IP all browser information and others so they can create their reports. I'm surprised that it surprises anyone after the years of them doing that. They (Avast) are not a nice company.

palant3• 7 years ago

Yes, according to the Avast privacy policy the data is "anonymized or pseudonymized." As I already speculated in https://palant.de/2019/10/28/avast-online-security-and-avast..., they likely went for pseudonymization in this particular case - meaning that they simply left the data as it is. The unique user ID being sent there is technically a pseudonym, meaning that it isn't directly tied to your identity. That this "clickstream data" is easily deanonymized - so far there is no indication that Avast cared.

aba_cz4• 7 years ago

It's not tied to your identity, but if you go frequently to some social sites with the same user id in the url (LinkedIn and others) it's possible to match that an HW id to a real name. Also when you buy coupon or goods which are tied to you just by unique ID the data science team could see that in the clickstream and it they were evil enough they could just use that (holiday coupon for example) for themselves. Or private photos shared by unique ID in url. Basically they (employees) could see everything from navigation bar and try to find out who it belongs to.

Source: Jumpshot/Avast employees

Funny example: They (developers) could see a man from Alaska (IP based) looking for an info about yeti and then going to buy a rifle in the same session.

gaspoda• 7 years ago

Avast already sold Jumpshot.

aba_cz4• 7 years ago

No. They've sold just 35%. Still using the same offices and data as they have been for years and will for many more years.

lousken2• 7 years ago

Not aware of that, but friends friend works in Jumpshot, they still have access to the avast data.

palant3• 7 years ago

Since I'm currently looking through Avast investor reports: no, Avast didn't sell Jumpshot. In fact, Jumpshot is one of their biggest growth areas. So they closed a strategic partnership with Ascential who should help Jumpshot's business grow even further. In return, Ascential was given the right to buy 35% of Jumpshot. The remaining 65% stay with Avast and Avast is continuing to supply them with data.

takeda• 7 years ago

Avast got from the best (free) AV solution to join the scum AV that is malware.

wruza• 7 years ago

Free cheese is always a part of a mouse trap.

aarongray• 7 years ago

What does a virus do? Makes your computer run slow, spies on you, and asks you for money

What do most antiviruses do? Makes your computer run slow, spies on you, and asks you for money

ndesaulniers• 7 years ago

Didn't a bunch of Mozilla execs leave for Avast? Ironic, if so.

(Looks the they went to AVG which got acquired by Avast)?

IvanK_net• 7 years ago

I wonder, that many people are scared of websites doing something they don't want them to do, but nobody is scared of extensions.

Extensions have much bigger permissions than websites. I never used any extension in my browser. I think it is already enough, that each website knows what I do on it, what I click etc. I don't need some third party to know, what I do on all websites.

obenn• 7 years ago

At this point I think the only options are using the built in OS security for personal use, and endpoint protection like fieldeffect.com or crowdstrike.com for businesses.

badness• 7 years ago

Seeing so much talk on various AVs being bad, how does bitdefender stack up in vileness?

Nextgrid2• 7 years ago

I had an incident at a client recently where their employees' (macOS) machines would have issues connecting to services on Localhost. The client's request would arrive to the server just fine, but the client would immediately get a connection reset ("empty reply from server" in curl) without getting the response from the server. Eventually we tracked it down to a BitDefender update.

s1k3b8• 7 years ago

Many years ago, I remember that avast was one of the antivirus software recommended over norton/mcafee/etc. Seems like all the idealistic and "good" tech/software eventually goes bad. Is it money that ultimately corrupts? From google to avast, they all seem to go from saints to sinners. Maybe I was just naive back then and they weren't saints to begin with.

Mozilla and Opera remove Avast extensions from their add-on stores

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