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posted by janrinok on Wednesday October 28 2015, @04:34AM   Printer-friendly
from the everybody-else-is dept.

Your antivirus software is watching you. A recent study shows that popular antivirus applications like Avast assign your computer a unique identifier and send a list of all web addresses you visit to the manufacturer. If the antivirus finds a suspicious document, it will send the document to the antivirus company. Yes, your antivirus company might have a list of web pages you've visited along with your sensitive personal documents!

http://www.av-comparatives.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/avc_datasending_2014_en.pdf (PDF Download) pretty charts comparing a variety of specific data reporting between vendors and products, https://www.bof.nl/live/wp-content/uploads/Letter-to-antivirus-companies-.pdf (PDF download) I believe this is the original open letter which led to the charts PDF

"According to a top-secret GCHQ warrant renewal request written in 2008 and published today by The Intercept, the British spy agency viewed Kaspersky software as an obstruction to its hacking operations and needed to reverse engineer it to find ways to neutralize the problem. Doing so required obtaining a warrant."

https://s3.amazonaws.com/s3.documentcloud.org/documents/2106783/project-camberdada.pdf (PDF Download) purports to be a top secret document outlining the interception to malware reporting to AV providers

So - how valuable is an AV program? Is your AV transmitting data to the NSA? Does your AV provide a "backdoor" into your computer?

Much has been said about the advisability of running an AV on *nix. Much has been said about the inherent security of *nix. Right now, I'm somewhat happy/relieved that I am NOT running any proprietary antivirus programs.

Disclaimer: I am reading a fascinating work of fiction, which postulates that your antivirus shares data with the NSA. Given that postulation, I went looking for information. I'll be more than happy to disclose the title and author in the comments section - just ask!


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  • (Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 28 2015, @12:54PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 28 2015, @12:54PM (#255545)

    Tell us how you really feel.

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