AVG Online Shield is a type of a real-time resident protection. It consists of two features - Web protection and Instant Messaging protection.

Web protection scans the downloaded files even before these are downloaded to your computer. This is done by scanning communication on ports TCP 80, 3128 and 8080 by default.

Instant Messaging protection verifies the files sending via instant messaging are virus free. Currently AVG supports the ICQ, MSN and Yahoo! protocols.

You can change settings of Online Shield component following way:

• Please open AVG User Interface.
• Double-click on the Online Shield component.

1. Web protection
Following settings may be changed on the Web tab:

• Check archives - Does Online Shield check the archive files (e.g. ZIP)?
• Report Potentially Unwanted Programs and Spyware threats - Does Online Shield detect the Potentially Unwanted Programs and Spyware infection?
• Use heuristic analysis - Does Online Shield use the heuristic analysis?
• What is the maximal size of the file that will be checked by Online Shield?

2. Instant Messaging protection
You can select what Instant Messaging application, that are supported, will be protected by Online Shield component:

• ICQ
• MSN
• Yahoo

In case you want to disable Online Shield component, please proceed as follows:

• Open AVG User Interface.
• Double-click on the Online Shield component.
• Un-tick the "Enable Online Shield" option.
• To confirm the settings please click on the "Save changes" button.

There are several possibilities how a clean and legitimate website may become infected:

• Website was exploited by some hacktoolkit which searches for vulnerable websites, and automatically infects them.
  

• Infection was inserted on the machine that is used to create/upload websites, which means that the author's/administrator's computer is infected.
  

• An attacker gained direct access to the website administration thanks to a weak or stolen access password.
  

We recommend to contact the administrator of such website. In case you are the creator of such website, please review its code. If the website seems to be clean, please contact our Technical Support and provide us with a link to the website. We will provide you with additional information about the detection.

If you want to exclude some web pages from AVG Online Shield component scanning, follow the steps mentioned below:

• Launch AVG program
• From top menu "Tools" select "Advanced settings..." option
• Select "Online Shield -> Web protection" branch in left navigation tree

In the "Exclude host/IP/domain" text field located at bottom right hand part of this dialog, you can define servers that should not be scanned by the web protection.

You can enter an:

• IP address
• IP address with mask (e.g. 192.168.0.0/16)
• Domain name
• Domain name with mask (e.g. www.avg.com/example)
• Domain name with wildcard (e.g. *.avg.com or www.*.com/example) – please note that only one wildcard is allowed in a URL

If entering multiple items, place each on a new line.

Note: Excluding some frequently visited websites from the web protection can speed up downloading the website content, however, make sure that you only exclude those websites that
are absolutely trustworthy and safe!

 

If the Online Shield component in AVG shows status "Initializing" and does not start, the issue can be caused by another application that is in conflict with this AVG component. It might be possible to rectify the issue by following these steps:

• Open menu Start -> Run (or Search).
• Type 'cmd' and click OK.
• In the opened command line window please type the following and press Enter:
  netsh winsock reset catalog
• Close the command line window and restart your computer.

Note:
In case the command will return message "Access is denied", please log into the computer as a user with administrative rights. For more information, please refer to FAQ 1196.

If the mentioned procedure does not solve the issue, please visit FAQ 1214 which lists all known conflicting applications and recommended solution.