Avira Paltalk and Online Armor issues

posted at Avira Antivir Support Forum today:

I just upgraded to 3 years of Premium Avira Suite (having done a 30 day eval. with Firewall, so no need for Online Armor) and everything is smooth).

But my old Compaq machine has Free Avira and Online Armor as well as MalwareBytes (free).

I do use Paltalk on this machine, and neither Avira nor MalwareBytes has ever caught anything. But Online Armor reported some very suspicious activity from Paltalk. I allowed Online Armor to block certain things, and I still had a fine long session in Paltalk Tuesday night. But ever since, Online Armour has been doing OAminidumps. I SUBMIT them via the minidump submit. When I go to DELETE, the machine hangs for a long time and then reboots. I booted in safe (F8) mode and the defragger said I needed to do chkdsk /f and that it could not be performed at the moment but would be performed at next reboot. When I rebooted, out of curiosity, I chose the Ubuntu boot, and it did a bit of fixing and then Ubuntu came up fine and stable. But each time I boot into Windows, I get the same Online Armor minidump crash. I am in safe mode right now on that machine after the chkdsk /f successfully ran. It is allowing me to do a defrag right now. As soon as that finishes, I think I shall delete Online Armor, with the assumption that the OAdump business will go away. I do wonder about the Paltalk issues, but I really enjoy Paltalk, and I know so many people around the world who use it, so it cannot be too malicious or destructive. I shall also post this at Online Armor’s forum, but I am curious to get the feedback from people here. Thanks for your great support!

Someone suggested at Avira that it would make more sense to tell Tall Emu, the makers of Online Armor, to which I reply:

[quote=’Farger’,index.php?page=Thread&postID=875210#post875210]HI WilliamBuell,

I think that more reasonable will be to ask Tallemu about this :S[/quote]

Of course I am going to tell Tallemu about this, but it IS a legitimate Avira issue with regard to the question of whether Paltalk is doing something questionable, and is escaping the attention of Avira AND malwarebytes.

The two strange things that happened with regard to Online Armor and Paltalk are that Paltalk when I first launched it, tried to access my drive directly, and Online Armor said this is a very suspicious activity. The other thing, which I blocked, had something to do with some key.dll. I didnt like the looks of it, so I blocked it, but Paltalk launched fine and I was in it for an hour. But after that, all this crash business started.

I was marveling to myself how a firewall can detect suspicious activity which an AV scanner might miss. So, this in itself is a valid issue to raise on the Avira forum, NAMELY, what can be said about those suspicious activities which only a Firewall can catch? There is one antivirus someone recommended to me which supposedly detects suspicious activity and can catch a virus or malware on DAY ZERO. I am perfectly happy with Avira Premium Suite on my wife’s computer, because I want everything integrated and straight foward, and the Avira fire wall is not “in your face” every other minute with questions.

A side note of interest: I find that I am able to access Paltalk on my Ubuntu machine via Firefox. Initially, I could not get audio or mic to work, but then Firefox installed an Adobe flash update, and suddenly it was working. So, I imagine I would be safe from Paltalk monkey business on an Ubuntu machine in a Firefox browser.