AVG touts faster scans and new features with AVG 9.0

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Jos

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Hot on the heels of Microsoft's Security Essentials launch last week, AVG Technologies is unveiling a major update to its free and paid internet security products which the company claims brings much faster scan times as well as a number of under-the-hood improvements.

Responding to customer feedback the security firm has reportedly put special focus on improving the user experience and ease of use. As a result, version 9.0 is said to be "up to 50 percent" faster than its predecessor, thanks to more sophisticated caching techniques and memory use. Boot times have also been reduced by around 10 to 15 percent and overall the installation process on the full-fledged suite has been shortened from 22 screens to 11.

In addition to the anti-phishing protection offered through LinkScanner, AVG 9.0 now also includes additional protection against identity theft in the physical world (for US customers only) with the AVG Identity Theft Recovery Unit (ITRU). Meanwhile, firewall enhancements include a complete redesign and a new cloud-based white listing database to reduce the amount of user input required to secure a PC.

Both AVG Internet Security 9 and AVG Anti-Virus are available now for a one-year license of $49.99 and $34.99, respectively. The main difference between the two is that AVG Anti-Virus lacks the firewall, identity protection, anti-spam, and system tools that come in AVG Internet Security. As always, a cut-down free version will also be available but starting from mid-October.

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Competition is a good thing. And since they have the link scanner (plus or minus), it does give them a feature over Ms product.
 
IE 7 and IE 8 have phishing protection (aka LinkScanner) built-in. So if you are using IE 7 or IE 8 you really are not gaining much, if anything, by using AVG LinkScanner.
 
I wonder if we're at the point where we're whitelisting instead of blacklisting application signatures? I've read before that there would soon be a turning point where it would be less resource intensive if we check signatures for software that's supposed to be on the computer, as opposed to the previously checking for virus/spyware/rootkit/malware signatures of files that shouldn't be on your computer.
 
This is not correct. LinkScanner is not just some anti-phishing tool, it can detect drive-by-downloads and new 0-day malware by detecting exploits that are used to deliver this malware. So definitely not the same as IE7 or IE8 features, these are much simpler and far behind 0-days
 
I wonder if we're at the point where we're whitelisting instead of blacklisting application signatures? I've read before that there would soon be a turning point where it would be less resource intensive if we check signatures for software that's supposed to be on the computer, as opposed to the previously checking for virus/spyware/rootkit/malware signatures of files that shouldn't be on your computer.
Whitelisting by itself is not sufficient and can work only in enterprise (very rigid) environments. But AVG9 also uses a bit of white-listing technology to significantly speed up on-demand scan, using results for files that can be trusted
 
I used AVG for years but recently switched to Avast which works better for me at least and a lot of others are migrating away from AVG as well.
 
I subscribed at one point with AVG & found it to be very revealing when they released AVG 8.0 free but still kept paying customers on the 7.5 version for months. In the end though, even 7.5 got bloated & having to wait about 5 minutes for it to update at every boot & for the system to be finally usable was too much.

Switched to Avast & even though it also has flaws, I haven't never looked back.
 
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