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« on: December 31, 2014, 09:20:16 PM »
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« Last Edit: April 15, 2015, 11:37:48 AM by Sulphate »

Offline Pondus

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Re: Avast accessing websites (DNS logs)
« Reply #1 on: December 31, 2014, 09:50:42 PM »
What avast version do you have?  I think this is related to avast secure DNS. This was asked / and explained by somone from avast team in another post

If i find it i will post a link....


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« Reply #2 on: December 31, 2014, 10:09:47 PM »
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« Last Edit: April 15, 2015, 11:37:34 AM by Sulphate »

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Re: Avast accessing websites (DNS logs)
« Reply #3 on: January 01, 2015, 10:00:51 AM »
Hello Sulphate

May the avast forum users have more information about the current issue that you are experiencing so we can clarify and fix the issue.


What OS do you use,x86 or x64?
If you use other antivirus did you use their official antivirus removal tool?
Windows Update and Drivers is all updated?
Other Programs you are using?
Other Programs you are using is it updated to the latest version?

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Re: Avast accessing websites (DNS logs)
« Reply #4 on: January 01, 2015, 10:56:32 AM »
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« Last Edit: January 04, 2015, 10:19:28 AM by Sulphate »

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« Reply #5 on: January 04, 2015, 10:21:36 AM »
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« Last Edit: April 15, 2015, 11:38:06 AM by Sulphate »

Offline RejZoR

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Re: Avast accessing websites (DNS logs)
« Reply #6 on: January 04, 2015, 10:51:07 AM »
Erm, why did you even bother asking here if you weren't interested in resolving the "issue" in the first place? We don't even know what you were on about with the DNS logs and avast! "accessing" webpages. I hope you do realize that avast! is verifying/scanning all accessed URL's and webpages for malware and phishing, ever thought it might be that?
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« Reply #7 on: January 04, 2015, 11:27:49 AM »
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« Last Edit: April 15, 2015, 11:38:57 AM by Sulphate »

Offline igor

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Re: Avast accessing websites (DNS logs)
« Reply #8 on: January 04, 2015, 12:30:37 PM »
Avast doesn't access those sites (should be easy to see via a firewall, shouldn't it?) - it only resolves those DNS records.
The operation is part of the Home Network Security feature - checks for DNS compromise / redirection to unrelated sites.

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Re: Avast accessing websites (DNS logs)
« Reply #9 on: January 04, 2015, 01:34:27 PM »
When i read your post, all it said was (let me quote it): "."

That was all it said, so don't yell at me for not understanding what a period is suppose to mean...

@igor
Maybe I don't quite understand it, but why does avast! have to resolve unrelated address through DNS if user doesn't actually try to access those specific webpages? I understand that if you visit one of the mentioned addresses, avast! checks if everything is fine, but why does it have to if you don't visit them?

I thought I understand the scanning/cloud part but apparently I'm missing knowledge on this one...
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Offline bob3160

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Re: Avast accessing websites (DNS logs)
« Reply #10 on: January 04, 2015, 02:46:54 PM »
Maybe I'm missing something ??? If someone were to examine my computer,
would it look as though I accessed these sites daily?
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Offline igor

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Re: Avast accessing websites (DNS logs)
« Reply #11 on: January 04, 2015, 06:29:06 PM »
Maybe I'm missing something ??? If someone were to examine my computer,
would it look as though I accessed these sites daily?

Nope - your computer doesn't access the site, there's no communication with the site, no data are downloaded from there.
Just your DNS server is asked to convert the particular domain to the corresponding IP address - but that IP address is not contacted.

Maybe I don't quite understand it, but why does avast! have to resolve unrelated address through DNS if user doesn't actually try to access those specific webpages? I understand that if you visit one of the mentioned addresses, avast! checks if everything is fine, but why does it have to if you don't visit them?

This is not connected with the ordinary Web Shield scanning. The Home Network Security feature tries to find vulnerabilities on your local network (say a router with the ROM-0 vulnerability, a router with a weak default password - accessible from the Internet etc.). It also tries to detect other problems like compromised DNS (be it a router problem, hijacked hosts file or something else) - part of which is checking (= resolving) a number of popular domains and somehow evaluating the result; if HNS concludes that the DNS returns suspicious results, it will notify you about the problem. [Like it or not, but those are quite popular domains - but it's certainly not a complete list of what's checked.]
So this is not about the scanning of a particular network connection, this is about evaluating the general state of your DNS. Whether Web Shield would detect the malicious content after your DNS redirects you to a bad site... well, maybe/hopefully. This is just another, different protection layer.

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« Reply #12 on: January 04, 2015, 08:29:12 PM »
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« Last Edit: April 15, 2015, 11:39:31 AM by Sulphate »

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Re: Avast accessing websites (DNS logs)
« Reply #13 on: January 04, 2015, 08:36:08 PM »
Nope - your computer doesn't access the site, there's no communication with the site, no data are downloaded from there.
Just your DNS server is asked to convert the particular domain to the corresponding IP address - but that IP address is not contacted.

So what you are saying is that Avast loads various "sites" (no comms, no data) to test the DNS IP address return ?
If so, why would it contain these type sites listed ? .....how does Avast choose sites to test IP ?

Anyway.....Wow, while I get the "intent" of this "layer" most definitely an activity I don't want happening in the background on my PCs....this is why I run OpenDNS.  IMHO seems to me Avast should work on extending items like ID-ing online exploits of your PC security holes (eg. Java, Adobe, etc.) and not trying to manage the network layer.....to me WAY out of the scope of an A/V.
« Last Edit: January 04, 2015, 09:37:13 PM by thekochs »

Offline lukor

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Re: Avast accessing websites (DNS logs)
« Reply #14 on: January 04, 2015, 10:28:44 PM »
Nope - your computer doesn't access the site, there's no communication with the site, no data are downloaded from there.
Just your DNS server is asked to convert the particular domain to the corresponding IP address - but that IP address is not contacted.

So what you are saying is that Avast loads various "sites" (no comms, no data) to test the DNS IP address return ?
If so, why would it contain these type sites listed ? .....how does Avast choose sites to test IP ?

Anyway.....Wow, while I get the "intent" of this "layer" most definitely an activity I don't want happening in the background on my PCs....this is why I run OpenDNS.  IMHO seems to me Avast should work on extending items like ID-ing online exploits of your PC security holes (eg. Java, Adobe, etc.) and not trying to manage the network layer.....to me WAY out of the scope of an A/V.

Hi,
avast does not load the sites, it merely connects to the router and ask it a few questions. It does not connect to the IP, does not check if the IP is accessible or not, nothing. Compare it to for example the prefetch feature of the modern browsers - where site might get downloaded only because it is shown in the search result list.

The sites used by avast happen to be from the alexa.com top 1000 sites list.

Can you please elaborate why you have troubles with avast doing these DNS requests? I can see now that it may not look pretty when the logs are viewed by some other person (say a network admin in a corporate environment), but why you personaly have issues with this?  Is it the bandwidth consumed by the DNS lookup (once a day) the concern? We would probably like to improve this and add more configuration options (such as a way to keep HNS enabled but disable this periodic scans - currently you can only disable HNS as a whole in Settings / Tools / HNS), but to do this we would like to know your reasons.

thanks. lukas