And it’s one of the most secure free antivirus offerings on the market at the moment.Īvast has a wide range of features and tools meant to help your online security. Judging by AV-Comparatives test results, Avast isn’t quite as secure as some others, but it’s definitely up there among the best. Which isn’t fantastic, but a lot better than the staggering 114 flagged by Panda. Offline, it managed to detect 92% of threats. F-Secure, G DATA, Panda, and Trend Macro managed to block 100% of the malware tested.Īnd in its Malware protection test dated September 2020, AV-Comparatives found that Avast managed to protect against 100% of online threats. And although this sounds pretty near perfect, there were several antivirus providers that did better. In its latest real-world protection report dated July-August 2020, Avast blocked 99.7% of the widespread malicious samples used in the test. Possibly the most well-known one is AV-Comparatives. Like a lot of industry-leading antivirus providers, Avast pays to have its products included in tests done by independent labs.
When i continued p2p shield, both of the files were detected, and as you know the all archive types are selected in the p2p shield settings.What did we find out during our Avast research? We had a look at the security features and independent lab test results – and there are some interesting things worth noting. This time, avast detected only the mp3 file.
Besides, when downloading a malicious zip archive by an internet browser, standard shield doesn't detect it (when web shield is paused), and i know this is normal since "ZIP archive" isn't selected.Ĥ) I paused p2p shield and then downloaded the same files. The detection of the mp3 file is normal, but how could it detect the file with zip format? Because in archive settings of the standard shield "ZIP archive" wasn't selected.
Thats why it's almost critical to run at least Standard Shield, Network Shield and Web Shield providers together (not just one or another alone), because only together they fully cover wider range of possible security holes to your system and provide maximum security.Īll other providers are not exactly necessary but they also provide additional protection layer depending on what programs you are using (email clients, P2P software, IM etc).ġ) All shields were at normal level, I downloaded two malicious files with mp3 and zip format by FrostWire, and avast didn't detect them.Ģ) Then I set the level of p2p shield to high, again it didn't detect them as i expected.ģ) After that I set the level of standard shield to high (that is, the setting named "All files" under the tab named "Scanner (Advanced)" was selected), i downloaded the same files and avast detected them. It also prevents known bad downloads (files) from even reaching your hard drive. This way you can prevent known exploits from affecting possibly still vulnerable browser. So anytime you view a webpage, pretty much entire content of that webpage is scanned by avast! even before it actually enters the browsers and also all downloaded files that come through HTTP protocol are also scanned. While Network Shield is checking malicious packets (like Sasser or MSBlast generated TCP traffic) and checking of webpage addresses, Web Shield is scanning the actual transfered data.
It stops the connection to malware even before the file is saved to the computer. WebShield scans only http traffic on redirected ports (generally, 80 only). Such as Win32.CodeRed, Win32.SQLSlammer, Win32.Blaster, in32.Welchia (Nachi) and Win32.Sasser. It is not a duplicate work with Standard Shield.īasically, it covers all Internet worms.
These kind of attacks are not easily catched by ordinary antivirus during file or mail scanning.
Typicaly these kind of viruses don't infect files but instead they attack running processes on your PC (either Windows components or some server programs like SQL Server, IIS etc.). Network Shield protects you from internet worms that spread themselves via various security holes in your system. It can be also taken as a lightweight firewall (or more precisely, an IDS (Intrusion Detection System). It analyses all network traffic and scans it for malicious contents. It can also block by IP's.Īlso, Network Shield is a protection against known Internet worms/attacks. The plan is to actually only block malicious URLs unless they're 100% certain there's no useful stuff hosted on the domain (in which case they will block it altogether). Network Shield works on both DNS and HTTP level, i.e., blocks domains on DNS level, but in no way it's limited to whole domains only. For performance reasons, though, it tries a bit harder in case of the well-known HTTP ports. Network Shield filters traffic coming from all applications (not only browsers), and on all ports.