Grisoft AVG wants to remove your keygens

[Appzalien]

I have been an AVG fanboy for over 6 years now and have recommended them to anyone who would listen, but last month I changed my mind, and now I tell everyone to uninstall them and find something new.

It all started one morning, you see... I run my pc 24/7 and my AV starts scanning my PC at 3:00am and is usually finished when I get up, and every morning I check my quarrantine to see if anything I collected from the previous day was infected. I do check things as they come in but this is a backup check and of course there are always new definitions to run.

This particular morning I was suprised to find about 5 keygens, all by BRD in my quarrantine. I was suspicious because they are older and have been scanned time and again, so I scanned them with A-Squared free and they came up clean so I bundled all the apps together and put there keys in a pass protected rar to prevent further AVG harrasment. A few days went by and there are several new keys in quarrantine, this time all of them by ZWT and after scanning with A-Squared I got mad because now I know whats going on. Grisoft is targeting keygens on my PC and tagging them as having trojans when they don't and hoping I won't notice so when the quarrantine time is up they will be deleted.

Next was NEO then NoPE and others as well, but from that point on I can't tell you who was next because I uninstalled AVG and installed a new anti-virus. I will probably never go back to using Grisoft software, I can never trust them again to have the run of my PC. What their doing is both deceptive and criminal in away. A keygen is what is called riskware, they have been known to be infected, but I don't need big brother snooping around my machine telling me what I can and can't do.

So you AVG users beware, you have been warned. Have you looked in your quarrantine lately? Grisoft won't put up a flag to warn you, its quarrantine only lasts 30 days and it starts deleting stuff, its about to ruin your day.

[Hairbautt]

Is this a personal experience? You didn't provide a source, but I'm all for a discussion if there are any other AVG users out there.

[abu_has_the_power]

nod32 is the ONLY way to go

[sear]

Agreed, screw AVG I had the anti virus about a year ago and it missed virus/malware which nuked my pc in the end I had to reformat and lost a lot of stuff. needless to say I won't be going back to Grisoft. Nod32 ftw

[ulun64]

NOD32 is best. I used to like AVG but their protection is weak.

[Yoga]

I remember doing a trend micro online scan, and it labeled the crack I applied to nod32 as malicious.

[TheGeneral]

AVG been doing the same to my keygens, but other than that i find its okay as a virus scaner + itz leagaly free so yea...

[raspberry1331]

I can also confirm this about the keygens, it already did this to me a year ago when i quitted using it. its protection is also weak, i got a virus or two with AVG. avast seems to be better, and it's also free.

one more thing came into my mind: my parents are still using AVG, and yesterday it found trojans in a cygwin dll, hilarious. so AVG free seems to become worse and worse.

[aktiv8]

AVG is still good, the keygen thing as been going on for longer than I can remember, but common sence says look at it with something else and trust your instincts almost...

As for the comment about finding a trojan in cygwin dll the reason it finds a "trojan" is from the heuristics I would expect. AVG does have one of the better heuristic scanners around so you will (like with any AV) get false positives. All I know is in years of using AVG I've NEVER had a viral infection

What everyone needs to remember overall is that there is NO *best* anti virus. Some pick things up other miss and so on - its depends on the development team behind it and how quickly the can get the viruses etc to analyse and therefore thwart within their AV.

I do recommend AVG for free but anyone who wants to pay for a good all round AV you cannot go far wrong with NOD32, but again it's a matter of opinion...

[Cheese]

Is this a personal experience? You didn't provide a source,

Ineed, it's almost as if he wrote his own piece and didn't just copy and paste someone else's story here from elsewhere. :mellow:



AVG has been giving me problems with keygens and cracks for a while now but I'm far too lazy to get another AV.

[Appzalien]

Yes this is from personal experience. I would have put up with it and kept Grisoft if it had accepted my input to ignore the file when it was tagging uninfected files, but I literally had to uninstall the darn thing to do anything with the files, it would'nt let me even scan them with something else unless I pulled the plug on their software. It became such a pain, finding the same files every morning or having to uninstall AVG so I could scan and pass protect the files it was finding I gave up and uninstalled them permanently.

Over a period of around 1 month I had to double check 65 keygens and all came up clean. Around 50 of them had been on my PC for over a year, some of them I had already used. At first I blamed it on heuristics so I turned it off and it still kept quarrantining keys.

I also belong to the AVG forum but everytime I try to post something about this it gets removed. The moderators claim to be just users who care but it seems more like their users who care about the corporation, not you.

[Hairbautt]

Cool. That's a lotta godamn keygens tho' :ermm:

[docv]

used to use avg. I use avast now which is also free.

Been working fine so far.

[betty2007]

NOD32 works fine for me.

[Appzalien]

I just found out that BitDefender has a new free version, so I loaded it up and its sweet. You give it an e-mail address and reactivate with a new key every 14 months.

[randome]

AVG did it to me too - I had a virus scare, and started AVG while getting a hold of Norton. It flagged the keygen as a trojan, which got me a bit worried - it does kind of make sense to seed trojans with antivirus products, as you know the users won't be protected yet!

That's one less apparent malware item I have to worry about, thanks for the heads up. :)

[tmo85]

Does AVG anti spyware do the same? i havnt had any problems with AVG, id be sorry to see the free anti spyware scan go.


That bit defender free virus scan, how well does it work? better than avarst? I love Nod 32 im on the trial at the moment.

[Snee]

Both AVG and KAV have had a tendency to remove keygens when I've used them, I've noticed that sort of thing for years now. It doesn't seem as if Avast, Panda or Symantech Pro does it, from what I can remember seeing.

Maybe some AV-manufacturers, or a few people working for them, make a bit of cash on the side, adding a keygen or crack to the virus definitions now and then. Pretty simple to sneak that sort of thing in, I reckon.

[zapjb]

I just found out that BitDefender has a new free version, so I loaded it up and its sweet. You give it an e-mail address and reactivate with a new key every 14 months.
http://www.bitdefender.com/PRODUCT-14-en--BitDefender-8-Free-Edition.html
....BitDefender Free Edition is an on-demand virus scanner, which is best used in a system recovery or forensics role. If you are on an "always-on" Internet connection, we strongly advise you to consider using a more complex antivirus solution....


No resident protection.

[Appzalien]

I don't know about that. On Demand means you have to manually run it and BitDefender free has schedualing so you can run any of it several type scans any time and every day if you want, unattended. That doesn't sound on demand to me.

I think its funny, the one PC I have thats not on all the time is my gaming PC, and I had not removed AVG from it. I bought the game Bioshock and loaded it and was using an internet fix that included a mini image so that I didn't have to load the cd every time. Inside this fix was a folder called real files that had Bioshock files in it supposedly from the actual DVD. Avg must have gotten a hold of the same fix and tagged all the files in it as trojans and inadvertantly tagged the actual Bioshock.exe in the real files folder too because the day after I loaded Bioshock (legit mind you) AVG tagged its exe file as a trojan. What idiots work there, they just randomly choose files from a crack they download off the net and then tag and add files to their definitions. They must look at Microsoft with those puppy eyes and pant, love us, we are protecting you from the bad people on the net pant pant! A bunch of Morons must be running that place now.