The Dominant Forces of Antiviruses

The brand name AVG comes from Grisoft's first product, "Anti-Virus Guard", launched in 1992 in the then Czechoslovakia. In 1997, the first AVG licenses were sold in Germany and UK. AVG was introduced to the U.S. in 1998.

The AVG Free Edition helped raise awareness of the AVG product line.

In 2006, the AVG security package grew to include anti-spyware, as AVG Technologies acquired ewido Networks, an anti-spyware group. That same year, Microsoft announced that AVG components would be available directly within the Windows Vista operating system.

AVG Technologies acquired Exploit Prevention Labs (XPL) in December 2007, and incorporated that company's LinkScanner safe search and surf technology into the AVG 8.0 security product range released in March 2008.

In January 2009, AVG Technologies acquired Sana Security, a developer of identity theft prevention software. This software was incorporated into the AVG security product range released in March 2009.

According to AVG Technologies, over 110 million users have AVG Anti-Virus protection, including users of the Free Edition.

Avira AntiVir Personal is for personal use only and free of charge. Like most antivirus software, it scans disks for malware and also runs as a background process, checking each opened and closed file. It can detect and possibly remove rootkits. It also performs Internet updates (daily by default) in which it opens a window, with an advertisement suggesting that the user purchase Avira AntiVir Premium or Avira Premium Security Suite. Avira updated all its products to version 10.0 in March 2010.

As a free service, Avira offers a bootable rescue CD to all users, regardless of whether they have any installed Avira products (free or non-free), and irrespective of the machine's operating system. This CD contains its own bootable Linux-based operating system and the AntiVir program with its latest virus database. If a computer cannot be booted, the CD may be used to boot the machine into the AntiVir program, then to scan for and remove detectable viruses and other malware, thereby possibly restoring normal boot and operation.

Avira AntiVir Premium has several improvements over the free version, including:

Email scanning (POP3 and SMTP)
WebGuard to block access to malicious sites
Avira AntiVir Premium Security Suite has some more improvements over both versions, including:

Anti Spam for E-mail
Firewall blocks hackers
Backup System to protect and secure important data
AntiBot prevents dangerous botnets from taking over your system
Parental Controls blocks unsuitable websites for Children and Teens
Avira GmbH is a German antivirus software company. When founded, the company was called "H+BEDV Datentechnik GmbH". Its antivirus applications are based on the AntiVir scan engine also known as "Luke Filewalker" (referring to Luke Skywalker), first launched in 1988. For aesthetic reasons, the name was changed to Avira. Avira's engine has been licensed to Ashampoo, Ad-Aware, and Webroot WebWasher.[citation needed] Avira is one of the most widely used antivirus programs in the world, with 100 million users worldwide As of September 2009[update]. The company supports the Auerbach Stiftung, a foundation created by the company's founder and CEO, Tjark Auerbach. It supports charitable, social, cultural, and science projects.

"Avira security software" refers to a range of antivirus and internet security software for the Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and Solaris computing platforms by Avira. These applications are based on the AntiVir antivirus engine also known as "Luke Filewalker", first launched in 1988.

On October 17, 2008, a big update to the search engine was released, which increased scanning speed by 20%.

Avira GmbH periodically "cleans out" the virus definition files, by replacing specific signatures with generic ones, which results in a general increase in performance and scanning speed. The last database clean-out was made on October 27, 2008, which caused problems to AntiVir Personal users when updating because of its large size (15 MB) and because of AntiVir Personal's slow servers. For that reason Avira GmbH added an additional 6 GB of bandwidth to the AntiVir Personal Servers and changed the updating process: Nowadays there are 32 smaller definition files which are updated regularly to avoid peaks in the download of updates.