Avast Antivirus keeps blocking our adult dating affiliate sites
 

Hello, I was wondering if anyone has been dealing with this issue. We operate multiple affiliate sites for adult dating & cams globally, and recently AVAST has been blocking all our pages quite aggressively.


We do not collect user information, our sites are free of cost to access, and do not contain any malware as reported by 70+ other antivirus vendors on VirusTotal.


AVAST is now used by Exoclick and TrafficStars/Xhamster to moderate advertising content, which is why we need this cleaned up asap so we can continue to advertise compliantly.


We are already working directly with Avast to remove our sites from the blacklist. I was wondering if anyone on GFY is facing the same issue, and if so, how did you fix it?


Feel free to PM me if you would like to share ideas privately, or just post here. Thanks

A lot of ad networks use the results from VirusTotal to determine compliance. AVG / Avast typically flag a lot of my sites as false positives, however they are usually pretty quick (24 hours or less) once you file an appeal.
WG

That is a good response time but certainly not what I have been experiencing on my end. I contacted them initially through the "false positive" form on their website and then further communication by email. Do you have any other contact info we could try?

Also, posted the below on the Avast forum, which describes our situation. But does not seem to have gotten the attention of their staff as of yet

"We did in fact report the false positive, and Avast team had already agreed to the file status as an FP. They cleared the FP from their database, atleast as per them.

However, after their first clearance, there was no change in fact reflecting yet, neither in WebShield nor in their Online Security browser extension.

I had requested them to recheck, at which point they mentioned they had fully whitelisted the URL and files a second time. Still no changes reflected.

I had requested them to recheck a third time, due to the still existing FP. No response as of yet (5 business days).

Is there anyone from Avast's team we could contact directly here to resolve this for good? This issue has been in support limbo for close to 3 weeks and we are eager to help restore full access to our website."

working with Avast, Norton, McAfee and the rest is a nightmare. So many false positives, so shitty algos flagging everything and their moms ..

Have your sites been re-flagged after being cleared or were they never cleared despite them saying it was? Have you been getting the AV warnings directly from the software itself or from a third party like VirusTotal (the issue might be with VirusTotal not updating their definitions and not necessarily with the direct AV product)?
WG

As of today

Flagged
“Cleared” (but no effect)
Flagged
“Cleared” (but no effect)
Flagged
Cleared (legitimately, on 19th March)
Flagged again within 4 hours.

Now, they are saying the URLs are *not* false positives and there is still malicious content to remove. Block reason “URL - Scam”.

The AV warnings are coming directly from Avast Webshield (their software) and the Avast browser extension. Avast is not included in the list of Virustotal vendors, but we are clean across the board in Virustotal.

We run a bare-bones “rules” lander for dating - no JS pop-ups, no back button redirects, no countdown timer, full privacy policy, terms, disclosure, contact us page. We do not collect emails or user info of any kind.

Only thing left that I suspect is our outbound tracking URLs being the issue - most of the SOI/DOI adult affiliate offers are also blocked by Avast. They must be blocking us for being in the URL chain and redirecting traffic to those dating and cam pages (which are clean in all other AV vendors)

I would estimate around 50-60% of affiliate ad URLs that run across the tubes, are being blocked by Avast. Not sure how those other advertisers are dealing with this issue, as in most cases they cannot control the final offer page from being flagged.

Indeed..