If you think, your website is getting more hits than usual, don't every jump into a conclusion that there are more users visiting..For all you know it will be a bot program scanning links on your site , checking if it's malware free, completely imitating a human searching for information on a website..
This is a new feature added into the AVG 8 Engine called the 'linkscanner'. It scans the links for malware before a user visits them. AVG acquired a company off-late called Exploit Prevention Labs, developer of link scanner safe surfing technology.
Now, Although Exploit Prevention Labs experience says that, in the world of web 2.0 attacks, dynamic link scanning would be the safest prevention from malware. For a minute consider the amount of traffic usage. Assume your favourite search engine gives you 10 results for a keyword. Now, if you have AVG 8 installed, it scans all the 10 links pre-hand to check if the content is malware free.
Good ?, Now, according to 'TheRegister', 20 million machines have upgraded to AVG 8. Think about the traffic increase, disk space wasted in logging link scans. IT IS HUMONGOUS..
Web Analytics will be severely impacted, Marketing team would get false data about the no.of hits to their website.. Now, the value of link scanner as an USP to AVG may be considered neat, may also be acceptable by the user, due to it's shear dynamic malware protection capabilities.
But the question which remains at large ,
Is link scanning really worth it at the cost of web traffic, web analytics, disk space etc..?, when the whole world is thinking about energy saving!! , Is there a smart way out ?
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