Few people realize how vulnerable they are online. The cyber criminals are out there waiting – armed with viruses, worms, trojans, and phishing. Anyone caught in the trap today has no excuse because of the availability of AVG Free.

Most other free antivirus will be able to scan your files for malicious software and remove it, but often require you to run them manually, or have definitions that are sorely out of date leaving you vulnerable to the ever updated threats. AVG on the other hand, features heuristic scanning in real time, protecting you from threats as they happen instead of after the fact. Not only that, but AVG monitors your web traffic for any malicious links as you browse, keeping you safe.

Users of AVG should keep in mind that they still need to remain diligent when online. Always update your virus definitions frequently. This can be done automatically by setting the preferences in the AVG interface. Do not browse suspicious websites. Although AVG Free will likely protect you from malicious websites, phishing dangers can sometimes go on for several hours before they are finally detected.

If you use your computer for work purposes or are otherwise very active online, the decision to purchase the full featured version of AVG may become more sensible. The upgraded versions of AVG include more sophisticated detection of malware such as the anti-rootkit, anti-spam, and firewall. Many users also will want free live support which is only included in the paid version of AVG. Ultimately the choice will be for the user to decide if they want to purchase the additional features, which are not absolutely required but can be a convenience for a lot of people.

The cyber world possesses many dangers, with new ones emerging every day. Instead of worrying, there really is no excuse not to be using AVG, especially when AVG Free Edition can be downloaded and installed easily without paying any money and will give your system essential protections.

“This latest issue really underscores how powerful, while at the same time vulnerable, social networking applications are. This attack was actually stunning in terms of scale,” said Roger Thompson, AVG’s Chief Research Officer. “Facebook is very responsive to threats when we identify them, and removing these applications as soon as they find them, but they’re still able to generate huge traffic, just because of the viral nature of social networks. It is staggering how many threats were propagated before they were stopped.”

The attack was pushed using an image of a woman in a bikini.  The same ad-supported viewer has been seen in other forms the previous week.  AVG is set to automatically detect such anomalies and report to security researchers who can investigate the matter further.

AVG’s server had detected more than 200,000 of the particular threat.  Later that number dwindled down to only a couple hundred per day.  Just when the AVG Free team thought that the threat would cease, all indications pointed to the nefarious group ramping up to do another fresh campaign.

While AVG understands the powerful uses of social networking and believes they should not be given up, AVG recommends some basic security checklists that users can perform.

1. Make sure you use AVG LinkScanner technology when browsing social networking sites so that you will be able to see which links are good and which may be unsafe.
2. Make sure you download AVG Free updates regularly and keep your other software updated as well.

AVG Free Edition is the most appreciated free anti-virus software on the web amongst users with now over 110 million users. AVG Anti-Virus Free Edition has earned its name and reputation through quality, speed, and effectiveness.

AVG Provides a large repository of options and modules. Anti-Spyware, Anti-Rootkit, Realtime protection and heuristic analysis of suspicious files. AVG also includes such novel features as email scanning and web link verification.

Installation

Downloading and installing AVG Free Edition Anti-Virus is relatively straight-forward with only a few steps. After you download AVG, you are given options to select which subcomponents you would like to install. The overall installation process is smooth and does not introduce any incredibly tough choices.

The installation process is only just the beginning of AVG Free Edition. There are far more important aspects to AVG such as behavior patterns, detection rates, and resource usage.

Detection

Testing the detection capabilities of AVG Free Edition is tough because it entails downloading thousands of malware samples and scanning each one. After downloading over 9,000 viruses, worms, trojans, and rootkits, they were sent off to AVG Free Edition for scanning.

Our tests found that roughly 94% of the malwares were detected and quarantined. Although a small percentage were undetected, this will happen with any anti-virus solution and the percentage that were detected and quarantined was actually extremely high compared to most other anti-virus even paid ones.

Resource Usage and Speed

After setting up a clean installation of Windows to test AVG Free without any other software getting in the way, we ran several tests to determine the resource usage and speed of AVG Free Edition.

There are several processor priority settings which affect both scan speed and CPU usage and the lowest setting ran the scan in just 17 minutes, while using about 20% of the CPU. The next highest setting completed the scan in 15 minutes but used 40% of the CPU. Finally we tried the fastest priority setting and it did an entire scan in just 8 minutes but really bogged down the system using 100% of the CPU most of the time.

User Interface and Friendliness

AVG Free Edition has been built with the average PC user in mind when designing its simplistic user interface. If the wording of each function were not apparent to the end user of what each function performed, there is a concise help file that will explain everything to them.

The main AVG window will display the current state of all of the installed components where you can enabled and disable individual components as you desire. Click on any of the component icons and you will be taken to a subpage where you can configure the specific functionality.

The interface for scanning the system allows a few basic options for novice users and lots of detailed configurations for more experienced users. You can choose directories to scan and whether to check for rootkits. You can also have AVG Free scan network folders across your LAN.

After the scan takes place, you will be given a summary of what was found. You can quarantine the files so that they will not affect your system any more but still allow you to retrieve them later in case there was a false positive. There is also an option to simply delete the files or even download them to AVG for further analysis.

Conclusion

AVG Free Edition includes a plethora of anti-virus components in an easy to download and use package. AVG Free definitely has an edge over other free anti-virus solutions when it comes to features. AVG Free Edition remains the top download choice for PC users all over the world.

AVG’s Virus Research Lab makes use of the 110 million people who have downloaded its software to detect virus trends in realtime and report back data which is in turn downloaded by other security solutions to enhance their products. The Virus Research Lab works with other agencies to combat the growing use of viruses used for online crime and to educate children on the importance of downloading AVG Free.

AVG Technologies appointed security wizard Yuval Ben-Itzhak is the senior vice president of engineering. Ben-Itzhak was formerly Chief Technology Officer for a global Web security company leading the company’s spirit, vision, intellectual property and technology. An innovator, he also holds a number of various US patents. He frequently speaks at top security conferences about AVG Free. Ben-Itzhak was selected as InfoWorld’s “Top 25 Most Influential CTOs of 2004″ and Computerworld’s “40 Innovative IT People to Watch, Under the Age of 40″ for 2007.

AVG Anti-Virus Free is a good solution and always is just one click away from the newest update. Having the latest updates is the key to any anti-virus software and is no different with AVG.

The update files can be downloaded as a standalone file that can be extracted to a temporary location on your PC and then installed. Otherwise, the updates can be downloaded from within the AVG Anti-Virus interface.

As AVG is one of the largest Anti-Virus solutions in the world, being able to add AVG functionality to your own product offerings is a smart choice which allows your business to take advantage of the speed and effectiveness of AVG Anti-Virus.

The AVG SDK is not new, however, having been available in 2006. This recent news should be a reminder to all businesses to consider their own anti-virus solutions for both end users and private use.

The following administrative tools are included with the AVG Rescue CD:

• Midnight Commander – a two-panel file manager
• Windows Registry Editor– simple registry editor for more experienced users
• TestDisk – powerful hard drive recovery tool
• Ping – to test the availability of network resources (servers, domains, IP addresses)
• Common Linux programs and services– vi text editor, OpenSSH daemon, ntfsprogs etc.

The AVG Rescue CD also contains tools to recover FAT32 and NTFS file systems and of course contains AVG Anti-Virus runnable through the CD as well. Although titled a Rescue CD, it is also available to download onto a USB bootable thumb drive.

Features:

• Anti-Virus – Scan all your files for anything that is a virus.
• Anti-Spyware – Adware and spyware is detected as well.
• LinkScanner – Scans each website you see in your browser for malicious software.

Installation Requirements:

The following operating systems are supported by AVG Free:

• Windows 2000 Professional
• Windows XP Home Edition
• Windows XP Professional
• Windows XP Professional x64
• Windows Vista (x86 and x64)
• Windows 7 (x86 and x64)

(Windows 95/98/ME are not supported anymore)

Minimum hardware requirements:

• Intel Pentium 1.8 GHz or equivalent CPU
• 512 MB of RAM
• 550 MB of free hard disk space

Download and Installation:

Download AVG Free Anti-virus Edition here: AVG Free download. You can run the installation file once you have downloaded it. You will be briefed at each step and will be allowed to choose install location. You will also be able to choose between standard and custom installation. By default, you will be installing the standard installation which is recommended to most system configurations. If at any time you want to change these settings you can after you have installed AVG Free. Download AVG Free Edition 9.0, install, and keep protected!

Only for users living in the United States, ITRU is a business partnership with Identity Guard which provides “consumer identity theft solutions”, given only from the AVG toolbar in Firefox and Internet Explorer. The interface is practically unchanged from the previous version, and generally it is fairly easy to maneuver.

From the main window, however, you must double click to get any meaningful information on a feature, whether scanning, LinkScanner settings, or updating. Making this into one click would be easier. A scheduling tool automates both scans and updates, while the upgrade banner advertisement at the bottom of the screen can be easily hidden using the Hide Notification button. When starting a scan, an option makes it easy to jump between Slow, Automatic, and Fast scans: faster scans are less comprehensive, so users should take advantage of the scanning preference that is recommended during installation to speed up the initial scan.

A progress meter for regular scans would be desired. Should a virus create a serious problem, AVG Free creates a rescue disk to scan your files in MS-DOS mode. The LinkScanner feature protects you from third-party code stuffing before they load in your browser and for ranking search engine results.

A bit of an annoyance, when you install the optional toolbar, you are commandeered to a new-tab page, which is decidedly inappropriate behavior. The program does not obviously tax your system resources when scanning or otherwise running in the background, although it can be determined that it will significantly slow down your system’s boot time, and cause a slight delay in shutdown time. AVG Free also detects some image files as potentially threatening, when two other scans decided that they were not, presumably false positives. AVG Free may not be the fastest or the most effective free antivirus choice, but it still gets the job done and you are much better off with it.