In January, Avast prevented about 3.5 million users from downloading malware or accessing malware distribution sites using HTTPS, making our interception of HTTPS traffic essential for our users’ security.
More than half of all website visits run on HTTPSĪbout 52% of web traffic runs on HTTPS, and Avast detects and blocks an average of 42,000 infected unique HTTPS URLs every day.
#Avast security for mac rating free#
The Avast HTTPS scanner is available in all our free and premium versions of Avast Antivirus, and is now also used by all our AVG versions for Windows. Our HTTPS scanner for Windows was rated with an A, the best possible grade. The results show that the only antivirus program that did not degrade client security was Avast Antivirus. Because of this, back in 2014, Avast introduced a way to scan HTTPS URLs for malicious activity in order to protect our users from being infected via malware transmitted over HTTPS sites.Ī group of scientists from the University of Michigan, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, University of California Berkeley, International Computer Science Institute, as well as from Mozilla, Cloudflare, and Google, have published a report that reveals that HTTPS scanning can cause new security issues. This, of course, includes cybercriminals. Today, anyone who owns a URL can obtain a TLS/SSL certificate, needed to encrypt the web traffic, and create a HTTPS website.
This means that the browser and the web server are the only points that see your browsing activity and the data you enter. Websites using HTTPS can increase privacy, as the connection between the browser and the website’s server is encrypted. Researchers have identified Avast as the only antivirus product that does not degrade the client’s security when scanning HTTPS traffic.