What is Prevalence Reporter?

[Harvey]

I have avg 8 installed in my windows xp, now my firewall i.e zone alarm, asking me for except prevalence report. What is the prevelence report? i'm keep getting this popup asking for access. Please help, what it is? what should i do?

[worm4u]

Here i found this info:

Prevalence Reporter a legitimate part of an application in the anti-virus program AVG 8.0. It lets you know about potentially malicious and dangerous sites on the internet.

Your firewall may bring up a message when you connect to the internet that states: "Prevalence Reporter is trying to access the Internet"

Allowing Prevalence Reporter to run on your PC will mean that your web searches will be accompanied by a green or grey check mark next to them. A green site is safe, while a grey site could be dangerous. You then need to make a decision about the site you are trying to access – continue to visit it, or take AVG's advice and leave it alone.

[Fleming]

The Prevalence Reporter is part of the AVG 8.0 application which sends back info about potentially dangerous sites that you may come across while searching the net. Once allowed to run, you will notice when you do a search on say google that all the results will have a green check mark next to them or a grey question mark. This is to indicate that the certificate is either accepted or questionable. If you place your mouse or the check or question mark a small dialog box will open with information for you regarding that particular search result.

[mikey32]

From YAHOO ANSWERS:

You'll notice the Alert includes the name of the file (avgcmgr.exe) that started all this. You can do a file Search (Windows Explorer, right-click on your C: drive, choose Search) and you'll find it in the c:\Program Files\AVG\AVG8 folder. This gives you the folder name of the program that uses this file, so you can decide if you've recently changed this program (or if a virus/spyware/etc. changed or added it).

Right-click on the filename, choose Properties. Here you'll find tabbed pages, each with different information, that can help you make a decision. In this case, it's simply sad that AVG didn't think to make it 'OK' for their own file. Just let it have Access.

The exception to this rule is that some viruses/trojans/etc. modify an existing file to make them appear harmless. An up-to-date virus checker is vital to keep this from happening.

As always, you can just Deny access. Then, if something you need stops working, choose Allow. If it pops up because you started something (asking for web-based Help in MS-Word, for example) you'll have to let Word get to the web.