Institutions (even non-commercial ones) are not allowed to use avast! Home Edition. However, ALWIL Software provides the full line of avast! antivirus products at special discount prices for non-profit, charity, educational and government institutions.
Antivirus kernel
The latest version of avast! antivirus kernel features outstanding detection abilities, together with high performance. You can expect 100% detection of In-the-Wild viruses (viruses already spreading between users) and excellent detection of Trojan horses.
The kernel is certified by ICSA; and frequently takes part in the tests of Virus Bulletin magazine, often yielding the VB100 award.
The avast! engine also features outstanding unpacking support. It can scan inside the following archives: ARJ, ZIP, MIME ( all associated formats), MAPI (Outlook pst files), DBX (Outlook Express archives), RAR, TAR, GZIP, CAB, BZIP2, ZOO, ACE, ARC, LHA/LHX, TNEF (winmail.dat), CPIO, CHM, RPM, ISO, 7ZIP and SIS. It also supports a number of executable packers (such as PKLite, Diet, UPX, ASPack, PeShield, FSG, MEW etc.).
Last, but not least, it can also scan for viruses hidden in Alternate data streams on NTFS volumes.
Simple User Interface
The Simple User Interface is used to start on-demand scanning, work with the results and change various options. Basic resident protection settings can be modified here.
The Simple User Interface is the main application of avast! 4 Home Edition. You can start additional avast! modules from here, such as the Virus Chest, Updater or Log Viewer.
The appearance of the Simple User Interface is very flexible. It supports so-called skins, allowing users to change the appearance of the application interface. The main package contains three skins.
Standard resident protection
Resident protection (the real-time protection of the operating system), is one of the most important parts of an antivirus program today. avast! features a powerful resident module that is able to detect a virus before it has any chance to infect your computer.
avast! Home Edition contains resident protection of the computer file system and a resident module for e-mails and news.
File system protection ensures that no virus will be started on the computer. It offers a wide range of settings, such as the possibility to specify that files will be scanned during copying, or that the scanning will include files with given set of extensions only.
E-mail/News protection consists of two independent modules; first, there is a generic scanner working on the SMTP/POP3/IMAP4/NNTP protocol level. It is capable of protecting any existing e-mail client that uses these protocols. Second, there is a special plugin for MS Outlook only; the mail scanning is completely transparent, requiring no special settings.
A new feature of version 4 is heuristic analysis of e-mail scanners. This feature can protect against new, unknown viruses and worms that are not possible to detect by the usual means. The heuristic module performs a thorough investigation of every e-mail message and watches for suspicious signs, that might announce virus presence. When the number of those signs exceeds a user-defined level, the message is considered dangerous and the user is warned.
P2P and IM Shields
Avast features a module for the protection of IM (Instant Messaging, “chat”) programs, and a module for the protection of P2P (peer-to-peer) programs. The list of supported IM and P2P programs is extensive with more than 30 programs currently supported.
While chat itself would not impose any serious security risks in terms of viruses, today’s IM applications are far from being just chatting tools: most of them support more or less sophisticated file sharing methods – which may quite easily lead to virus infections, if not properly monitored.
The P2P protection module doesn’t need much explanation – on today’s P2P networks (such as Kazaa) there are thousands of infected files, and an effective protection is a must.
Network Shield
A new resident protection module was added to avast! 4.5: the Network Shield. This module provides protection against known Internet worms/attacks. It analyses all network traffic and scans it for malicious contents. It can be viewed as a lightweight firewall (or more precisely, an IDS (Intrusion Detection System)).
The Network Shield is only available on NT-based systems (Windows NT/2000/XP/2003).
Web Shield
Web Shield is a unique feature of avast! that enables it to monitor and filter all HTTP traffic coming from the Web sites on the Internet. Since an increasing number of viruses (and other malware, such as adware, spyware and dialers) are being distributed via the World Wide Web, the need for an effective countermeasures has also increased. The Web Shield acts as a transparent HTTP proxy and is compatible with all major web browsers, including Microsoft Internet Explorer, FireFox, Mozilla and Opera.
Unlike most competitive solutions, Web Shield’s impact on browsing speed is almost negligible. This is because of a unique feature called “Intelligent Stream Scan” that lets the Web Shield module scan objects on-the-fly, without the need of caching them locally. Stream scanning is performed in operating memory only (without the necessity to flush the contents to disk), providing maximum possible throughput rates.
Automatic updates
Automatic updates are another need in virus protection. Both the virus database and the program itself can be updated automatically. The updates are incremental, with only new or missing data downloaded: thus reducing the transfer heavily. The typical size of a virus database update are tens of KB; program updates are typically in the hundreds of KB range.
If your Internet connection is persistent, the updates are performed completely automatically at fixed time intervals. If you connect to the Internet only occasionally, avast! watches your connection and tries to perform the update when you are online.
Having an up-to-date virus database and antivirus program is the most certain way to protect your computer.
Virus Chest
The Virus Chest can be thought of as a folder on your disk drive, having special properties that make it a safe, isolated place suitable for storing certain files. You can work with the files in the Chest, though with some security restrictions.
The main properties of the Virus Chest are complete isolation from the rest of the operating system. No outside process, such as a virus, may access the files inside, and the fact that the files inside the Chest may not be run (executable), there is no danger in storing viruses there.
Or
Nguồn: vnecon.vn
