Irate over increase in avast! false positives

I have had avast! for several months. In the last week I have noticed much more of a problem with false positives. In the last week avast! has blocked as purported malware Dr. Web CureIt!, File Scout, and Panda Cloud Cleaner. (I take an especially dim view of the self-interested phenomenon of a security program identifying other security programs as malware. I've seen others, including Norton, Trend Micro, and Comodo do this as well on Virus Total scans.)

I read somewhere that avast! was not strong on behavior-based detection. Could it be that now they are trying to address that, but it's going badly awry? (Also suggesting a change at avast! is that I am seeing for the first time this week a lot of screens that offer me the suggested option to "allow" and enter things as "trusted".)

I still think based on my research that avast! is probably the best of the free anti-virus programs, but I don't want to have to spend all my time whitelisting things.

 

Take control, study all the options available - there are a lot! And get onto Avast! and tell them exactly how you feel! Ok, enough!!!

First thing I do is prevent the AutoSandboxing from happening - I want to be offered the choice of what to do! Main page > File system shield > AutoSandbox - set to ASK.

Then you need to study the WebReputation plugin - do you really need it, will it add any more protection than SmartScreen in IE or Google's Safe Browsing as built into Chrome and Firefox?

There are just so many little 'features' in there, it would take me days to describe them all, well, the ones I have enabled.

Overall, I still prefer the latest version of Avast to the other free alternatives, so I'm resigned to making a few decisions every month - yes, once you have it tuned to your 'working style', that's probably all it will take.