Http Packet Hijacking
It seems BitDefender is hijacking HTTP packets and analyzing them before they reach their intended destination. While this is sound from a security perspective, it does create some akward problems for advanced users.
Problem at hand:
I was trying to configure gzip compression on a nginx local development server inside a vagrant box. Try as I might, I could not make it work. Every time I rebooted the server and retried with all my browsers, I could not find the "Content-Enconding: gzip" header I was looking for. After numerous Google searches on the topic, I came across this thread: StackOverflow thread. After reading this persons report of BitDefender being a possible culprit, I decided to test. So I visited remote sites which were confirmed by 3rd party testing tools to be GZIP enabled. I did not find the header I was looking for on these requests either. So I went ahead and uninstalled BitDefender, rebooted my machine and tested again, with both my local development server and remote servers. The header is now present. So indeed it was BitDefender that was interfering with HTTP traffic.
Proposed solutions:
Add the ability to temporarily disable traffic analysis, either as a whole, or filtered by protocol and/or an IP whitelist, whichever is more reasonable to you.
At the moment the only way to get around this is to uninstall BitDefender altogether. And yes, I have tried disabling the antivirus, the firewall and every other security setting that came with an off switch. Nothing worked except uninstalling and rebooting my machine.
That having been said, I think your product is great. I'll most likely renew my license when the time comes. BUT, I do hope someone actually read these feature requests and considers them.
Regards,
Pascu Vlad
