AVG solves fake traffic problem

AVG has released a fix for its virus scanning software that within a few days should halt the deluge of fake traffic flooding the internet.

A new feature in version 8.0 of the company's antivirus package analysed pages returned by search engines before a user even clicked on them, looking for potentially dangerous malware.

Because the visits appeared in logs under the user's IP address, using an Internet Explorer user agent, the visits were extremely difficult to filter out of traffic logs.

This caused problems for webmasters, who discovered anomalous spikes in traffic and increased bandwidth costs.

However, the problems have been "addressed and rectified", claims Peter Cameron, managing director of AVG Australia and New Zealand, posting on a popular Australian technology forum.

The Whirlpool forum and its users had been vocal critics of the new feature, with the site receiving over 700 hits a minute from the indiscriminate software.

"This update has now been released to users and has also been built into the latest installation package for AVG Free," said Cameron. "It typically takes several days for all free users to get updated so results of this change should be seen by early next week. A similar update for AVG's commercial users will be released on Tuesday as previously notified."