AVG 9.0 launched

Rudolph Muller

Rudolph Muller is the editor at MyBroadband and covers telecoms and broadband news. Rudolph comes from an academic background, but left the University of...

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AVG Technologies today announced that its family of free and paid internet security products, AVG 9.0, would be available to the market in October 2009. AVG 9.0 boasts improvements to speed, protection, and user interface, as well as new feature (for US customers only) – free protection against identity theft.

“AVG 9.0 will provide home computer users with a more powerful and more streamlined solution that adds protection without impacting user experience, taking us back to our core strength of low impact, high performance security,” said J.R. Smith, CEO, AVG Technologies.

“We’ve always believed that everyone has the right to a safe online experience. With AVG 9.0, we are providing first-class assistance to our users in their development of tools and measures for their safety from all of the threats posed by cybercriminals and identity thieves, whether they’re working, playing, banking or shopping on the web,” Smith continued.

Improved features

Scan optimization is a top priority for AVG 9.0’s combined anti-virus/anti-spyware scanner. The scanner marks files as safe or potentially unsafe during the initial scan, and skips the safe files in future scans unless the file structure changes.

As a result, users experience reduced scan times – up to 50% depending on system configuration – as well as improvements of 10% to 15% for boot times and memory usage.

AVG 9.0 combines modern technologies to optimize real time protection.  Starting with the foundation of signature-based protection to deal with known threats, AVG 9.0 builds on top of that behavioural, in-the-cloud, and white listing technologies to address the tens of thousands of new threats daily. 

AVG 9.0 integrates the Resident Shield, firewall, and identity protection modules, enabling the modules to share malware information with each other, increasing detection and removal of malware, rootkits, and ID Theft threats, for which signatures have not yet been issued.

The firewall enhancements include a complete redesign to reduce intrusive firewall ASK dialogues by 50 percent.  This makes the firewall application “quieter” and less intrusive. A new “trusted” database of applications and application certificates allows the firewall to see whether it is safe to allow communication or if it should be blocked.

Additionally, because the firewall works behind the scenes with the behavioural detection technology in the AVG Identity Protection module, it can deliver one of the most accurate detection levels of new and unknown threats.

AVG 9.0 has improved anti-phishing detection through enhancements to its LinkScanner offering, accurately determining whether or not a web page is hosting a phishing attack. This is accomplished by allowing the software to apply more than 100 different potential threat indicators to a page.

If the result is inconclusive, LinkScanner then makes a call to the cloud to check a multitude of phishing feeds plugged into the AVG research network to make a final determination of the threat.

Availability and pricing

The complete AVG 9.0 paid family of consumer products is available now. Pricing for a one-year, one-seat license starts at R273.99 and a two-year, one-seat license for starts at R406.99. AVG Free 9.0 will be available from mid-October.

AVG 9.0 – comments and views