Monday, August 23, 2010

Growth Equity Investor Summit Partners Invests $100 Million in AVAST Software

AVAST Software, developers of the world’s most popular antivirus program, today announced that growth equity investor Summit Partners has invested $100 million for a minority stake in the company.

”Summit Partners' investment is a vote of confidence in our disruptive ‘freemium’ business model, which combines a full-fledged free product with a premium one,” said Vince Steckler, CEO of AVAST Software. ”This approach is already upsetting the traditional antivirus market. Instead of paying for advertising or installation on new computers, AVAST continues to experience dramatic growth as fans of avast! recommend our products to their friends. Word-of-mouth from our large and loyal satisfied customer base is certainly the most effective—and low-cost—form of advertising.”

avast! antivirus now protects one out of every five computers around the world from malware. Its award-winning protection is based on the CommunityIQ system of user-submitted data on suspected viruses and infected websites. Independent testing confirms that avast! Free Antivirus protection meets or exceeds the performance of most paid products.

Thursday, August 19, 2010

Free Software Saves You Money

Whoever said nothing in this world is free obviously hasn't spent much time on the Web. Thousands of downloadable programs and online services exist in cyberspace — if you know where to look, that is. From powerful photo editors to no-cost alternatives for storing important files, there's no shortage of quality programs you can take advantage of. The catch?

Some of these apps may be advertising-supported and don't offer extensive tech support, if any. In some cases, you might also see a "nag screen" to upgrade to a pro version of the software. If you can live with these minor inconveniences, the following is a look at five recommended freebies.

Sunday, August 15, 2010

New Wave of Zbot-Infected Emails

Security researchers warn of a new wave of spam emails with different subjects and content distributing a variant of the Zbot trojan in attachments.

Judging from the subjects of the rogue emails, like "Another candidate brought to you", "EBOD Meeting MEC Update", "Fw: New Taxes Coming", "Summary of payments" or "Sales Dept" the attack targets business users.

The interesting aspect of this campaign is that there are several emails with different subject and content that carry the same payload – a new Zbot variant with a very low detection rate.

One of the messages, which sounds credible enough, even misuses IBM's name in order to trick recipients into opening the malicious attachment and executing the malware.

Saturday, August 14, 2010

avast! antivirus delivers results for free

avast! Free Antivirus scored better than some of the best-known paid products in the latest Virus Bulletin test, proving cost is not an effective measurement of quality.

avast! Free Antivirus detected all In-the-Wild viruses – including the newest W32/Virut samples – on a computer running Windows Vista. The tests were made by the Virus Bulletin, an independent authority on computer security.

“With extra kudos for prettiness, reliability and ease of testing, avast! comfortably wins another VB100 award,” wrote John Hawes, team director of Virus Bulletin’s VB100 testing program, in his August 2010 review.

In addition to spotting 100% of the In-the-Wild viruses, avast! Free Antivirus was a top performer in VB’s battery of malware detection tests, beating out paid products from McAfee and Symantec.

Friday, August 13, 2010

To trust or not to trust?

Trust brings together two hot topics that concern our users. First topic – Win32:Injected-AZ which is suspected by many users of being a false positive. Second topic – the reliability of digital signatures (authenticode).

Tuesday, August 10, 2010

Updates are essential in the ‘cat and mouse’ malware wars

Again and again and again… That’s what comes to my mind every time when I see a new variant of the Kavo family and, most recently, also the Hilot family. These malware samples are machine-generated and their authors can develop a “completely new” set of samples based on a simple change made to the generator itself. What’s the problem here? These changes are not random as we earlier thought, they’re precisely targeted against the most popular AV engines.

Let’s describe it with the Hilot case. This malware family is detected algorithmically by our engine and the detection can be called a generic detection (this means not with a fixed signature or checksum). Once the authors notice a higher detection rate of their binaries, they have decided to change the generator. What surprised me was the tight boundary to our detection. We have been checking some characteristics of a significant block inside the binary as a part of our detection process and this block is a part of our cat and mouse game. But, the Hilot authors then shifted this significant block in response.

 
Copyright 2009-2010 Antivirus Avast Antivirus Avast — free software for virus protection