How To Stop Avast For Mac From Scanning Web Sites

by Martin Brinkmann on October 31, 2014 in Security - Last Update: October 31, 2014 - 33 comments

1. Avast
2. How To Stop Avast For Mac From Scanning Web Websites

Security companies such as AVG, Kaspersky or Avast release new versions of their products each year to the public. The updates do introduce new features from time to time and may also change the interface of the program as well.

Avast released its 2015 lineup recently and one of the new features that all of its antivirus programs ship with is HTTPS Scanning.

1. Select 'Stop for 10 minutes' to briefly stop the shield or click 'Stop Permanently' to permanently stop the module. Click 'Yes' to confirm the action and disable the module.
2. Using the exceptions in Avast you can simply add any file or URL to the list of exclusions and exclude it from scanning and shield protection, therefore also from blocking. For more information about adding exceptions, check our full guide ‘ How to Add File/Website Exception into Avast Antivirus 2018 ‘.
3. Avast Mac Security offers three shields and on-demand scanning. Our Web Shield and Mail Shield combine to check the vast majority of incoming data from the Internet, while File Shield scans all programs stored and executed from your hard drive.

Jul 03, 2017  Avast, a complete security solution for your device that is designed specially to keep away all sorts of malicious threats and viruses. Avast/Lukas ‘s “fix” was to get rid of the bug and then hide the function by removing the option to turn off HTTPS scanning. In other words Avast now forces you to accept HTTPS scanning. This is Avast’s answer to bad criticism of a program feature. Force it on the user and then hide the fact that it’s there.

It enables the program to detect and decrypt protected traffic using its web filtering component. This alone is highly problematic considering that the program is tapping right into protected data streams but the current implementation is causing all kinds of issues on top of that.

Avast

Update: An update to the most recent version of Avast or Firefox seems to resolve the issue.

Firefox users for example may notice that the browser won't close anymore because of Avast's HTTPS Scanning feature. This may not happen all the time when Firefox is closed but users reported that it is happening frequently.

That's however not the only issue that Firefox users may experience if Avast is installed on the computer system the browser is running on.

Firefox's add-on update check may be blocked by the security software as well.

The Mozilla Firefox web browser is not the only program that is affected by issues though. Spotify's Web Player may not be able to connect to Spotify for example with Avast 2015 running on the system.

Users who experience issues after installing the latest version of Avast 2015 have two options:

1. Disable HTTPS Scanning.
2. Uninstall Avast completely.

It is thankfully pretty easy to disable HTTPS Scanning in the application.

1. Open the Avast dashboard on the affected system.
2. Select Settings from the left sidebar menu.
3. Switch to Active Protection.
4. Click on Customize next to Web Shield.
5. Uncheck the 'Enable HTTPS Scanning' option and click ok.

This turns off the feature in Avast and problems that you have experienced should be a thing of the past.

There is no option to turn off the HTTPS Scanning feature in Avast during installation. While you can disable the Web Shield during installation, it impacts more than just HTTPS scanning and is generally not recommended. (thanks Sören)

Avast's HTTPS Scanning interferes with Firefox and other programs

Description

The new HTTPS Scanning feature of Avast 2015's Web Shield interferes with programs such as Firefox or Spotify. Find out how to resolve the issues.

Author

Advertisement

An update rolled out yesterday to Avast's antivirus product contained a bug that flags legitimate Web sites as malware infected.

In a blog post late yesterday, Avast acknowledged the false positive glitch in an update known as 110411-1, which was automatically rolled out to Avast AV users earlier that day. The error has specifically affected versions 4.x, 5.x, and 6.x of Avast's antivirus software.

In an e-mail to CNET, an Avast spokesman said today that the update was downloaded by around 5 million users, mostly on the Western Hemisphere due to the time in which it was launched.

In-house sensors discovered the problem just a few minutes after the buggy update was released, and Avast workers managed to create and release a fix within 45 minutes, according to the company.

Known as 110411-2, the fix must be manually installed. Avast is advising all users to update their antivirus definitions by right-clicking the Avast taskbar icon (the orange (a) ball), then selecting Update, and then selecting Engine and Virus Definitions.

The Avast spokesman said the problem was caused by a bug in the company's URL normalizer library, which is used to modify a Web site's address into a standard format.

Avast apologized for the 'inconvenience,' saying that since only remote sites and not local files were affected, the fix should completely resolve the problem. Despite Avast's solution, some of the more than 200 users commenting to the blog post are complaining that certain local files were in fact quarantined, forcing them to now restore those files.

The Avast spokesman said that for most users, the faulty update solely blocked access to certain sites. But if someone ran the software's on-demand scan of the hard drive, then any HTML files stored locally could have been quarantined. That scan was performed by some people when Avast first revealed the problem. But the spokesman expressed hope that these people have since been able to restore the files from the quarantine after the problem was resolved.

Some commenters criticized Avast for not communicating about the problem more effectively. An Avast employee responding to those complaints acknowledged that the company is trying to determine how it can better communicate in the future. Although it did spread work about the error through its Twitter stream and its Facebook page, Avast said its main focus was on fixing the problem as quickly as possible.

Other commenters on the blog post and on Facebook took the opportunity to praise Avast for its quick response and communication.

How To Stop Avast For Mac From Scanning Web Websites

Updated at 10:00 a.m. PTwith more details from Avast.