AntiVirus Reviews

Avast antivirus has gained some extreme popularity over the past couple of years, currently it has over 100 million users worldwide. Having such a wide fan base also means that it makes for a great alternative to the big brands out there, such as Seagate Norton and Kaspersky antivirus suites.

Set-up and installation:

The installation of Avast Pro Antivirus 6.0 is simple and straightforward. The complete installation was done well under a couple of minutes and the best part about that was, it did not demand any reboot.

Interface:

There are very few software interfaces that can be both great looking and perfectly functional, well, the Avast Antivirus Pro 6 is one of them. The main page lists the current security status of the system at the top and right under that, there is the on and off options for silent and gaming modes. With these options, you will be able to prevent the suite from displaying any pop-up messages for a set time period. It is also worth mentioning that the suite will automatically stop showing any pop ups if any application is running in full screen mode, which is a very thoughtful feature to include. There is a set of menu options to the left of the screen that provides you with quick and simple access to the suites extras such as the real-time protection features, virus scans and other miscellaneous protection features.

Avast’s System Tray context menu provides you with shortcuts to some of the popular Avast commands like SafeZome and Gaming Mode. You will also be able to disable the real-time shields for a while from the main menu. All of Avast Pro Antivirus 6’s bells and whistles are stored in the Additional Protection menu. In the sandbox, you will be able to run the notorious applications within a limited analysis state. In the situation where the application has malware, the suite the try and limit the damage it will cause to your system.

The only disadvantage that we found with the Avast interface is that, the suite plays a voiceover whenever something important happens. Your very first experience of this will be when you launch the application for the first time. A woman’s voice says “Welcome to Avast”, which can be quite annoying to hear over and over again. The good news is, you still can disable this feature in the settings menu and disabling the enable Avast sounds.

Features:

Avast is certainly much better than many of the leading antivirus suites when it comes to the department of features as well as protection.

Real-Time Shields:

The Real-Time Shields is one of the suite’s features where the software performs instantaneous scanning on the potentially unknown virus threats. And the suite has a broad spectrum of such real-time scanners for items such as instant messaging, web scripts, mail, P2P apps, arbitrary network connections, file system, and other such malware. On each of the scanners, there is a graph that details the current scanning activity and there will also be a red bar that comes up on the screen in case an intrusion is being attempted.

AutoSandbox:

Another of the new features of the Avast Pro Antivirus 6.0 Version is the AutoSandbox feature that utilises the real-time heuristics to put the applications that show suspicious behaviour in the sandbox without the user giving any sort of input.

SafeZone:

The most interesting and notable of the miscellaneous features is its SafeZone. This feature is a unique one that brings in a separate desktop that is a nag-free and stripped down Google Chrome, known as the SafeZone Browser. The feature is just built from the open source code of chrome, with just a few exceptions, but it is technically equivalent to the chrome itself.  This feature of the suite makes sure that none of the other applications or browser extension get access to the Safezone’s execution context as well as traffic from network. This also makes sure that the keystroke loggers and other malware from getting your personal and sensitive data.

Virus Scanning:

Avast Pro AntiVirus 6 offers a wide range of virus scanning options; such as a Full Scan of the drives, Quick Scan of the critical system areas, a custom scan for some specific files and directories, a scan of all the removable storage devices that are currently attached to the system and also a boot-time scan that will initiate each and every time the system is being restarted. Unfortunately, the suite is in the bottom in the scale when it comes to updating the virus definition database as it has an average of 2 updates for every day.

Speed:

Since the Avast Pro Antivirus 6 is rich in functionality, it can be forgiven if the software is not setting any particular records with the performance capabilities. The suite was able to scan just about 19MB of data per second, and for a 1GB file it took about a minute. While this is not the worst among the suites, it does place the software in the bottom three.

One of the biggest performance factors that consumers look for in the current antivirus suites is not only that the software provides top class protection to the system, but also does not slow down the performance of the computer too much by eating up all of its resources. The memory usage is quite minimal at 6.6MB, it increased about 22 seconds to the restart time, the installation of the program itself requires 280MB of your hard drive space, which it quite nominal. The first scan rates at about 20mbps and the subsequent scans take about 19mbps. The suite added fractions of a second to application launches and file conversions. Hence, as the numbers indicate, the Avast Pro Antivirus 6 is one among the best with less performance impact on the system.

Virus and Malware Detection:

Protection is the most important functionality that we expect from a software suite. So let us have a look how the leading virus and Malware testing industries have certified the suite. AV Comparatives have two main tests that they conduct, the first one is the Proactive Test in which Avast was rated 2 out of three stars and the second test is called the ‘On Demand Detection Test’ and Avast excelled in this test getting all three stars.  AV Test performed three tests on the suite with Windows 7 platform, Windows XP and Windows Vista and had scores that were good enough to get the lab’s certification. The ICSA and Virus Bulletin Labs have also certified the suite 100%. The West Coast Labs specialises in functionality testing and performance validation, and the Avast Pro Antivirus 6 has managed to get the WCL’s checkmark.

Support:

Avast always has had excellent help file assistance and the technical support options are quite good too. As we had mentioned previously, the suite has an excellent interface, offering great on-screen assistance and has great pop-up texts that define what are the features and options are all about. There is a great local help file, which is quite thorough and well written, simple to look for and organised well too. Unfortunately, it is not that simple to get help from Avast. The only link that you will be able to get through to the support site is in the local help file and when clicked, it opens the company’s support centre only in the help browser and not on your default one. Even after you manage to get there, all you get is a knowledge base, looking through the forums, and finally providing a support ticket. There is no live chat support either.

Verdict:

Overall, the Avast Pro Antivirus 6 is great with very few downsides. The only thing annoying with the suite is the woman’s voice over that will definitely force you to mute the speakers. The average scanning performance too is below average. However, the suite offers a fantastic interface with some of the features that are hardly provided with other suites. It also has some solid performance against viruses and malware. Autobox and SafeBone are fantastic features to be included in an entry-level commercial software. The Avast Pro Antivirus 6 is a great alternative to Norton and certainly deserves some serious consideration.

Avast Pro AntiVirus 6 Security Software – Package Details

Lab	Avast
Software Name	Avast Pro AntiVirus 6
Suite type	Antivirus protection
License type	Three users
License Validation period	1 year
Package type	Complete package
Operating System	Windows XP SP2+ 32-bit Windows Server 2003, Vista, 7 (32-bit and 64-bit) only RTM versions are supported (Windows 7 SP1 RC is currently also supported)
Software Requirements	Processor: Pentium 300 MHz or faster RAM: 128MB Hard Disk: 210MB free space MS Internet Explorer 6.0 or higher
Supported browsers	Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 or higher Mozilla Firefox 2 or higher Google Chrome
Anti-Virus	Yes
FireWall	Security that blocks intruders and hackers, even in your wireless network
Identity Protection	Confidential information filter that protects your personal data
Anti-Phishing	Yes
Anti-Spam	Yes
Core technology	Antivirus and anti-spyware engine Real-time anti-rootkit protection Silent Firewall avast! WebRep avast! CommunityIQ
Hitech Features	Boot-time scanner Safe Zone Auto Sandbox Intelligent Scanner Gaming Mode Green Computing
Real-time Shields	File System Shield Mail Shield Web Shield P2P Shield/IM Shield Network Shield Script Shield Behavior Shield
Other security features	64-bit support Heuristics engine Code emulator Automatic processing Smart virus definition updates Fast application of updates Multi-threaded scanning optimization Wake-up/Scheduled scanning Command-line scanner
Special Operating Modes	Multimedia/Gaming Mode
Support	Technical Support by e-mail and web

Norton 360 is Symantec’s all in one security, and the latest version is the version5.0. While the version 4.0 had included a lot of new features such as, change in graphics user interface, the prominent colours matching the black and gold colours of the suites sibling Norton Internet Security. The ineffective spam filter was replaced with a much effective Symantec BrightMail, offering about 20% better performance.

Symantec claims that this newest version Norton 360 Version 5.0 comes with a much better performance in all areas including virus detection. The new additions to the suite include SONAR v3.0 as well as System Insight. This version has received a makeover sporting realistic animations and icons. The backup and restore utility has also been improved. In the following review, we will not be looking at the suite itself, as we have discussed about it in detail here in Norton 360 review, however, we will be looking at all the changes and additions made to the suite.

Design changes:

The major of the design changes is the change in Norton’s logo with a checkmark and logo. This logo might look familiar because, Norton got Verisign last year, and it has managed to integrated technologies in a single efficient package. In the last year’s version, the interface was not completely standard user friendly; no changes in settings could be made in this mode. In the latest version, this has been changed to a certain extent. However, it has not been changed to the desired extent, for instance, the StartUp manager allows only the Admin to access the account.

Installation of Version 5.0 Norton 360:

For installation, it requires a couple of restarts, which is not unexpected. However, we found that those virus signatures are not updated immediately. While Live Updates run, the suite downloaded a whooping 98.16MB worth of updates.

Lab Results:

Symantec’s claim that the Norton 360 V5.0 all-in-one security suite has an improved performance is confirmed with the test results. The suite has received a VB 100% from the famous Virus Bulletin. As far as virus detection and removal is concerned, both the WestCoast labs and ICSA have certified the suite. AV Test gave the suite pretty high scores for protection, usability and repair of threats too. The AV Comparatives has given the software suite an Advanced +, which is the highest rating for malware eradication and a lesser Advanced for proactive measures for new malwares. Dennis Technology labs with Trend and ESET labelled Norton 360 v5 as the best performing product.

World Protection map:

With this suite, you are not just provided with a world map of the top city threats, it sports quite a unique Norton Crime Index. When you click on it, a browser window opens citing the percentage of cyber crime that is increasing or decreasing. This part also provides with live news feeds on the most recent product releases etc.

Norton Download Insight:

The Norton Download Insight secures the system from the dangers that arise by downloading. It does so by not just checking each and every file against its own database, but also the database of the other Norton software users. While Download Insight previously supported only Firefox and Internet Explorer browsers, this time it has support for a range of browsers and clients such as, MSN Explorer, QQ Chat, Bit Torrent, Opera Browser, ThunderBird Email, Outlook Express, AOL browser, Limewire, Windows Mail, Safari Browser, Chrome Browser, Yahoo Messenger and FileZilla.

Firewall:

With the firewall feature, you will be able to check everything that goes in and out your computer, making the list very crammed. One big disadvantage is that, the software does not allow to search for programs through its firewall list and hence, you will end up going through every entry to stop or activate a program. If the software finds a file that comes in as a false positive, there is not way you will be able to ignore it in an intuitive way. Which means, once the file is caught, you will have to disable the antivirus and restore the file through Security History, go through the settings, and then put it into the exclusion list. We feel that the Full History option should be able to list the complete history, which Norton has not done. Instead, it gives only provides the threats in the list that are caught, with no indication of the files that have been ignored or closed with no action taken.

Vulnerability Protection:

As far as vulnerability protection is concerned, Norton does not just leave with the basic virus protection. It also keeps an eye on the most vulnerable programs on PC, which if not updated regularly, will easily be attacked by malware. The PC programs are nothing but the common applications that are based on the internet, such as, Silverlight, JAVA and Adobe Flash.

Safe Web Scanner:

The Safe Web Scanner is one of the newest features that checks news feeds and Facebook walls for bad links and other threats from the Norton Control Centre. We felt that the Facebook integration feature was not as intuitive as it could have been as too much interaction is required in order to let the user know that such an option is actually available, which should have been just available as default. In case you suspect a site, just click on the Safe Web and enter the UR, which will check if the site is safe or not, the suite will also check its huge database to see it has been rated as malicious or not.

Parental controls:

Symantec has also increased protection on parental controls in Norton 350 Version 5.0 Security Software, which will give the parents instant insight on what their children are doing online from anywhere remotely. With this account, you get web access to what the kid is looking, searching and accessing online. It is not a simple information on browser history, but also a neat and categorically divided information age wise that is offered support by Norton experts and community. Though it is not fully featured like the NetNanny software, but it is a good start for a suite that is mainly aimed at the home users.

Verdict:

The Symantec Norton 360 is one of the best firewalls and offered consistently high lab results. It is now much better at malware removal and has very low performance impact with a simple as well as efficient spam filtering and high end phishing protection. Though there have been a few disadvantages, this is the best security that your money can buy now. Symantec Norton 360 is just an all in all security suite, which is a install and forget suite.

Norton 360 Version 5.0 Antivirus – Specification Table

Lab	Symantec
Software name	Norton 360
Suite type	All in one security suite
License type	Complete package
License quantity	One year three users
Package type	Retail
OS Supported	Microsoft® Windows® XP (32-bit) with Service Pack 2 or later Home/Professional/Media Center, Microsoft® Windows Vista® (32-bit and 64-bit) Starter/Home Basic/ Home Premium/Business /Ultimate, Microsoft® Windows® 7 (32-bit and 64-bit) Starter/Home Basic/ Home Premium/Professional/Ultimate
Minimum hardware	300-MHz or faster processor 256 MB of RAM; 512 MB recommended 300 MB of available hard disk space Must meet minimum operating system requirements for Microsoft Windows XP/Vista/Win7 Internet Explorer® 6.0 or higher, or Mozilla Firefox® 3.0 or higher Internet connection – a high-speed connection is required for online backup
Anti-Virus	Yes
FireWall	Yes
Anti-Spyware	Yes
Other Key features	PC Tune-up Web, File, Email protection IM Antivirus Application Control Proactive Defence Network Attack Blocker Identity protection Pulse updates Worm protection Rootkit protection Anti-Spam Network Monitor Anti-Phishing Anti-Banner Parental Control Back-up Malware protection Bot protection
Online backup	2GB

In the past couple of years AVG Internet Security has gone through a bit of a revolution, by moving away from its origins of security suite and antivirus and it has now become extremely professional by offering features such as online backup, high end parental control as well as PC clean-up. The design engineers in AVG also seem to be making some major positive changes to the core protection technology, and the latest AVG Internet Security 2012 is the best example. Let us see if each and every component lives up to the great expectations.

Features retained with some additions:

2011’s AVG Internet Security main window had a whopping fourteen icons of security and this year’s feature has retained all of the identical features, but with the shrinking of icons to just eight of them. There are three more icons giving you access to AVG PC Tuneup 2011, AVG Family Safety as well as AVG LiveKive internet backup.

Resource usage:

Without any doubts all of you would agree that the most important thing that the users will be looking for in a security suite is minimal usage of the resources. Nobody like their system to slowdown, and this is definitely mandatory than any great protection against malware. The good news is that, the AVG Internet Security 2012 suite did very well in performance with less resource usage. The AVG Internet Security Suite 2012 just took 6% longer then the same system without the suite. The antivirus suites will check the files on access, if they try to overdo the protection, they will end up slowing down the file operations. All of the web protection components including the LinkScanner does not seem to slow down the browsing experience in any way. AVG Internet Security 2012 did not have the lowest impact on any particular test, but it did have lesser impact than an average suite. Overall AVG has delivered on its promise to reduce the system resource usage.

Internal changes:

There are some enhancements made under the hood that are not visible. The latest addition is the AVG Accelerator that has promised to increase the download speeds from Download and YouTube and few others too. While it was a bit tough to measure the speeds, the YouTube videos did seem to be loading a lot quicker. The team at AVG suggest that you keep looking at your system for things that may aid in speeding up things and for now, what the suite does, is to request you to restart the browser when it detects using up heaps of memory.

LinkScanner:

The AVG 2012 Internet Security Package also has a feature known as LinkScanner that looks for malicious codes on webpages and it also manages to know what is running in the web browser. With the help of the latter feature, the suite gets the power to handle some of the more dynamic threats codes that seems to be spread of a number of WebPages. As far as scareware is concerned, AVG Internet Security 2011 makes use of the patent pending technique in order to detect the scareware program that is fully based on its user prompts and actions. With the help of this technology, it will be able to detect some of the latest scareware without the need of a file signature.

Firewall:

AVG Internet Security 2012’s Firewall has protection profiles including Home network, business and public network, with each of the profile having its own complete configuration settings. We recommend that you do not fiddle with these setting without any instruction from the support team. This Firewall was able to manage the work of stealthinng all the system’s ports. The suite passed out with flying colours in most of our web-attack testing. Like we had mentioned previously, the LinkScanner was able to put off attack over the network by both identifying and blocking the exploits. AVG has database of the known trusted programs and by default, the firewall seems to be automatically configuring the network programs for such programs. And, as far as the unknown programs are concerned, the old school query pops up, asking you if each and every program has to be allowed for complete entrée, only to the networks that are identified to be safe, or, it will just provide no access at all.
This type of program control is not so impressive. The latest firewalls like the one in Kaspersky Internet Security 2012 and Norton have employed the in-built aptitude in order to make security decisions. Just requesting the user to make a decision seems like getting into trouble. The suite seems to be still vulnerable to some of the basic attacks that will be a piece of cake for a malware coder and easily turn off the protection. All that is required is to set up the start-up status of the essential windows services to AVG to be disabled and then force in a reboot too. Suites such as TrendMicro Titanium, Norton and ZoneAlarm simply will not allow for any external change of this setting. Overall, the firewall does not match the quality of the antivirus, using the out of date user input technique for program control. We are looking for more enhancements in this area.

Online protection:

There is a feature known as Online Shield that is a component of the LinkScanner and is not available on the free version. While re-downloading the malware about half of the preexisting samples, and that is just average performance. The common features included in both the paid and free versions include the LinkScanner’s Surf-Shield as well as Search-Shield features. While the former looks out for the websites that hot spiteful exploits and takes away the users from such sites and the latter feature marks of the hazardous result links of the famous search engines. The Surf Shield feature is also supposed to be keeping you off from the fraud phishing websites, however, when the feature was put into test, it did not do a good job. Norton is the best when it comes to this task.

Social network protection:

Just like the antivirus suite, this 2012 AVG Internet Security also installs a tool bar offering some safe search and quick access to Facebook and few of the other features. With the PCAnalyzer tools, they check your system to see if it will be able to benefit by using AVG PC TuneUp 2011, which can be bought separately and then integrated into the security suite.

Malware protection:

Being free does not mean that AVG is any less on protection, it possess the same set of malware security as in the case of the full version. In our malware testing, the AVG Internet Security Suite 2012 managed to install with no issues and was also faster than most of the other leading suites in the market. One strange thing was that, we found the rootkit scan to be separate from the complete system scan. The suite was able to detect 88% of the threats, which is extremely good. The suite also performed quite well at malware blocking and it also managed to point out all the scareware and rootkit samples.

Spam filtering:

Everybody are not looking for a spam filter on the client side. Most of the email accounts will get filtered at lots of layers and even by the service provider. The AVG is capable of filtering the entering POP3 email accounts and also provide an identify marker in the subject line of the spam messages. This gets integrated with the Microsoft Outlook in order to immediately transfer these messages into the spam folder. The people who are making use of some other mail client will end up defining a rule in order to divert this spam.

Similar to the 2011 version of the suite, the current version of the suite also has advanced settings dialog box includes lots and lots of detailed settings meant for the spam filter. The only setting that we believe that an average user may be able to make changes to, is the big slider that allows you to control the spam filtering levels. The default level, which is the least aggressive one will avoid the false positives, but the down side is that, it will allow for more spam to pass through, with the higher level filtering more spam, but then, this will throw out the good mails too. The spam filter did not take longer than the time it would have taken without the filter. However, the bad news here is that, the 2012 version of AVG Internet Security was not as good as the 2011 version, allowing about 50% of spam inside the inbox, compared to the 8% of last year. If you are serious about throwing out the spam mails, we recommend that you just turn off AVG’s spam filtering and install Cloudmark.

Parental controls:

While many of the security suites included parental controls, the closest AVG comes to including parental controls, is the integration of separately bought AVG Family Safety. With AVG’s current promotion, you will be able to get this extra feature for free with a meagre donation. On the System Tools component, you will get a range of options to analyse what has been happening inside your system. On the processes tab, you also get to see whose behaviour is being watched by the suite, along with the particular behaviours it is looking for, and these behaviours include both good and bad, such as having a visible window and Windows directory. All the programs will be launched at start-up, including the complete path name and system location too from which the program launches. You also get an option to delete any of the start-up entry, and note that what you delete is permanently gone. Unless you are the AVG programmer, do not try to fiddle with settings of LSPs tables, connections and browser extensions.

Verdict:

The best thing about AVG Internet Security 2012 is its antivirus component. It managed to score quite well in malware removal and blocking tests. As we had mentioned earlier, we were totally impressed by the very low impact on system resources, which is quite a considerable improvement over the 2011 version. Firewall however, was not so impressive and was old fashioned and worse, it could be disabled programmatically by a malware. The antispam let lots of spam mails slip through and the antiphishing component of LinkScanner was also lagging quite a bit behind the best in the market. overall, it is a pretty good suite, however, you will be able to get the best elements of AVG Internet Security 2012 for free on AVG Anti-Virus 2012. For a complete protection, we will always recommend Norton Internet Security 2011.

AVG Internet Security Suite 2012 – Software Details

Lab	AVG
Software name	AVG Internet Security 2012
Suite type	Internet Security
License type	Standard
License Validation period	1 year
License quantity	3 users/ 4 users
Minimal System requirements	Intel Pentium 1.5 GHz or faster 512 MB of RAM memory 1000 MB free space
Recommended system requirements	Intel Pentium 1.8 GHz or faster 512 MB of RAM memory 1550 MB free space
OS Compatibility	Windows Vista, Windows XP, Windows 7
Email	Yes
Instant Messaging	Yes
Anti-Virus	Yes
FireWall	Yes
Anti-Spyware	Yes
Anti-Phishing	Yes
Anti-Spam	Yes
Special Operating Modes	No
Tune up	No
Parental Control	No (extra)
Data Backup	No (extra)
Support	FAQ, forum, videos, email; free phone support in US, UK, Canada.