With hundreds of millions of users, AVG is a widely used anti-virus tool. The software is a subsidiary of Avast, which is another popular anti-virus brand.
In pirate slang, the term Avast can be loosely translated to “Stop!” and this week that translation directly applied to Pirate Bay users.
Starting a few days ago, many AVG users noticed that the popular torrent site had become unusable. Instead of listing the usual sea of content and download links, The Pirate Bay appeared empty.
The overview page of the most recent torrents was pretty much a blank page and torrent detail pages were completely stripped of content as well, as shown below.
While The Pirate Bay does run into technical issues on occasion, this time around an external application is to blame. As it turns out, AVG blocked access to Apibay.org, the domain where The Pirate Bay pulls its database content from.
AVG users who are not running silent mode would see the following error message pop up, which is triggered by AVG’s web shield.
“We have safely aborted connection on apibay.org because it was infected with URL:Blacklist. More threats may be lurking!”
The warning isn’t very specific. We contacted AVG to discover the nature of the problem with this domain, but the company’s support team was not able to provide any concrete details right away. It simply said that it’s a potential threat.
“AVG has a designated virus definitions database and as per our virus definitions, this particular website is being detected as a potential threat,” the company says.
This isn’t the first time that Apibay.org has been flagged by an anti-virus vendor. Earlier this year, Malwarebytes blocked it because of links to cryptocurrency miners. These were eventually removed after which the warning disappeared as well.
It seemed likely that something similar happened here. However, just before publishing this article a ‘higher level’ AVG employee contacted us with an update. After running a new check the site is “confirmed clean” and the detection was cleared.
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Note: When we wrote this article earlier today AVG still blocked apibay.org. The issue was resolved shortly before publication and the article has been updated accordingly.
