Attention Required: Web access protection disabled... YES I KNOW!

[MartiniGM 0]

Because NOD32 blocks many non dangerous sites I've disabled the Web access protection. But NOD32 now keeps hassling me about the feature being disabled.

Is it possible - in settings, in registry, anywhere - to turn off this warning?

 

Thank you,

Martin

[Marcos 5,259]

How do you know that those websites were not hacked and are not serving malware? Please post some links but obfuscate them so that they are non-clickable. Web access protection is crucial for protecting your system from Internet-borne threats and should never be disabled as long as a computer is connected to the Internet.

[MarcH 1]

@Marcos - It is surely up to the end-user how they use the software. Whether or not people disable certain feature is up to them.  If Eset is vehemently against such things then the ability for end-users to switch things on/off should not be included in the interface.

So, rather than criticise the end-user for such practices, calmly provide the information they requested, or provide such an answer that will satisfy.  Do you turn off, or adjust, the UAC settings in Windows? Many users do as they do not care to be annoyed beyond a reasonable amount by the design of software.

[Marcos 5,259]

If you want to keep web access protection disabled and thus lose protection against Internet-borne threats, you can do so at your own risk. To suppress the change of the protection status, open the advanced setup, navigate to User interface -> Application statuses -> Web and email and untick "Web access protection is disabled".

One should no go this route to avoid blocking of allegedly legitimates sites. Instead, block websites should be reported to samples[at]eset.com to find out the reason of blocking.

[Aryeh Goretsky 386]

Hello,

Just to follow up to my colleague Marcos' comments, ESET's softwre flags sites as malicious for a variety of reasons.  It might be the site has a malicious binary on it, has a malicious script on it, is involved in criminal activity (phishing, for example), or somehow does something which affects the confidentiality, integrity or availability of your computer.

ESET is a company whose business is protecting its customers from computer-borne threats.  Of course, there are dozens of companies which do this besides ESET, and ESET strives to be the one that you choose over all those others by providing your computer with the best protection possible.  And that means relying on ESET to make decisions about what is or is not harmful to your computer.

Now, ESET has all sorts of classifications for different types of threats (potentially unwanted applications, potentially unsafe applications, websites etc.) which it uses to categorize those risks.  And, occasionally, it might get those wrong, which is what we call a false positive (i.e., a report of something when something isn't there).

My colleague has asked for a list of URLs that are being blocked so he can investigate why they are being blocked.  It could be they are hosting some kind of malware.  Or maybe it's an example of the aforementioned false positive scenario.

But, the point is, without telling ESET which sites are being blocked, ESET cannot tell you why the sites are being blocked.  If you don't feel comfortable mentioning the web sites in a public message, that's fine.  Send a private message with the web sites, or report them to ESET's researchers by following the instructions in http://support.eset.com/kb141/?locale=en_US.  Someone from ESET can then investigate your report.  Otherwise, we're kind of stuck in a situation where no one can put together enough pieces of information to determine what's actually happening.

Regards,

Aryeh Goretsky