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Six months ago, AVG acquired Exploit Prevention Labs and its Linkscanner, a tool that automatically scans search engine results before you click on them. If you search Google, for instance, and ten results turn up, it visits all ten links to ensure they're malware free.Then, in late April, AVG rolled Linkscanner into its anti-virus engine, which has about 70 million active users worldwide. The company estimates that 20 million machines have upgraded to the tool's new incarnation, AVG version 8, and this has already cooked up enough ghost clicks to skew traffic not only on The Reg but any number of other sites as well.At the moment, there is a way of filtering AVG traffic from log files. But it's unclear whether this method would bag legitimate traffic as well. And Thompson suggests that - in the name of high security - AVG may make changes that prevent such filtering.That could destroy web analytics as we know it.
Used by roughly 20 million people worldwide - and counting - AVG's newest anti-malware tool scans search engine results before you click on them. If you type a keyword into Google, for instance, it automatically visits each site that turns up on Google's results page.That includes sites that appear as "sponsored links" - a clever name for adverts. And in the wake of our recent AVG-annoys-webmasters story, many assumed the scanner was generating not only fake web traffic but also fake ad clicks, forcing advertisers to pay for eyeballs they aren't really getting.But in scanning sponsored sites, AVG is careful to bypass the Google mechanism that records paid clicks. Rather than use Google's hyperlink, it uses the site's raw URL. "We parse out the target and go straight there, skipping any Google click counter," says Pat Bitton, head of communications at AVG, a Czech company with regional offices in the US and the UK.And according to Bitton, this has been the case since AVG added Linkscanner to its anti-virus engine in late April.
