Yesterday I updated to Avast 8 by accident and to my dismay there are a ton of extra network active services within Avast (not PC services). So I disabled them all but still there are constant attempts to send traffic to both 77.234.43.86 and 77.234.43.87, every 10 seconds. I tried blocking those IPs in my firewall (Comodo) by blocking the Avast executables, then blocking the IPs directly, but they keep going. So I disabled all network traffic in Comodo and they still keep trying to connect! They are able to completely bypass my firewall, there is no way to stop them except using a separate IP blocker (which is how I trapped them). fyi
Those IP addresses are registered to Avast servers in the UK and appear to be related to the cloud component of Avast 8.
Yep. The worst part is that my firewall cannot stop the traffic, even when I tell it to stop all traffic. Since then I found that Avast had installed an anti spam component in Outlook that adds new buttons and cannot be disabled legitimately. I found a quick cure by editing the registry. The buttons are gone, but now there are connections to other IPs being made that also cannot be blocked by my firewall. I'm rapidly going off Avast. They either let me have control of my PC or they can get the f off my PC. I am no longer recommending them.
I removed Avast from my "gaming rig" almost 2 weeks ago. After reading your posts, I definitely won't be reinstalling it. I don't like software that circumvents security measures. Doesn't really matter much if the intention is pure. It still creates an unnecessary security hole. Thanks for posting this. I'm having a hard time finding antivirus software I'm actually comfortable with these days. Right now, my router is configured to use the Norton ConnectSafe DNS with McAfee SiteAdvisor Live, Malwarebyte's AntiMalware installed. My HTPC is just running BitDefender Free, but I don't have java or flash installed and only come to this forum.
If I remember correctly there was or still is issue at least for some where comodo firewall pretty much allows everything through. They may not play nicely together, I'd ask around at Comodo forums. If you want less trafic disable reputation thingy and streaming updates.
Thanks for the headsup. I'm using version 5 of Comodo still because they made 6 trickier to administer. Seems I lucked up, some people get a BSOD with version 6 when Avast 8 is installed! Hmm, Comodo Antivirus component has been out a while now, I'll look at that too.
If you look through the settings page of Avast 8, there are a load of options that are useless, such as community connections, and other things that keep you connected to services you don't need If you take a few minutes and go through them all, you can pretty much get rid of any annoying things and have a decent AV running again I install Avast 8 on all machines I repair, many of them only have 3G Dongles as connections to the net, and I get no complaints of extra data being munched
You shouldn't have to disable bloat or useless options in an antivirus application to make it useable....
Yeah, I went through every single menu and setting and disabled everything that can keep avast connected or communicating. All auto updates are off as well. Yet there are constant attempts to connect to the web since installing Avast 8 that cannot be stopped except by an IP blocker. Many of them are prefixed by 4 attempts to do a local lookup on 224.0.0.252 Like this: Sorry its blurred, Fileshack is ignoring the scaling settings. There are 2 issues on my system: 1) Avast cannot be stopped from trying to communicate 2) Either avast has ways round my firewall or my firewall has a bug.
Btw, it could be that when it has made a connection once, it stops trying for a long time. This may be why it doesnt happen so often on other machines. On my machine, it does the above every minute for a while, has 5 or 10 mins off and starts again. There are other IPs that do similar since installing Avast 8, none of this happened before. My annoyance is that I can get no control over this traffic using avast or my firewall.
