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Avast Home Edition 4.8.1229.80923 is a free antivirus, and it was released this year September 23, 2008. Even if it was just released less than a month (since the date today is Oct 8), 30,937,233 people have already downloaded this program at Download.com. Even the Editor of Download.com has given Avast Home Edition a perfect score 5/5. It just proves that Avast Home Edition is a program worthy for our attention. This program has the following workings, according to the publisher’s description: On demand scanner with skinnable simple interface, choose what you want to scan and just press the play button; On access scanner, special providers to protect the most of available e-mail clients; Instant messaging–ICQ, Miranda; Network traffic–intrusion detection, lightweight firewall; P2P protection for Kazaa, BitTorrent; Web shield–monitors and filters all HTTP traffic; NNTP scanner–scans all Usenet Newsgroup traffic and all operations with files on PC; Boot time scanner–scans disks in the same way and in the same time as Windows CHKDSK does.
Now even portable music players may get viruses as well. According to the Kaspersky Lab website, they have discovered a virus, named Podloso which behaves in this manner:
If the virus is installed on the iPod by the user, the virus then installs itself to the folder which contains program demo versions. Podloso cannot be launched automatically without user involvement.
Once launched, the virus scans the device’s hard disk and infects all executable .elf format files. Any attempt to launch these files will cause the virus to display a message on the screen which says “You are infected with Oslo the first iPodLinux Virus”.
Fortunately, this is only a “proof of concept” virus, which is created for the sole purpose of proving that it is possible to infect a specific platform, and it does not spread on its own; the user has to install Linux on the iPod and save the virus to the iPod for the device to become infected.
Live One Care, an anti-virus software owned by Microsoft, recently failed to protect Vista users from viruses. Vista is the newest operating system released by Microsoft. A group of researchers who are based in Oxfordshire, U. K. tested some anti virus software packages. These packages which were actually designed for Vista were released to businesses some two months ago to see if they could stop a set of viruses recently available. Out of the 15 anti virus softwares tested, four products failed to conform. Live One Care included. The other three are McAfee VirusScan Enterprise version 8.1i; Norman VirusControl v5.90 and G DATA AntiVirusKit 2007 v17.0.6353.
The Service Pack 1 update of Windows Vista will be released on March 2008 and it is expected that in this operating system update, there will be numerous system enhancements and improvements in functionalities. The main dilemma of this anticipated system update deals with its effects on third-party applications, specifically the anti-virus programs. John Hawes, Virus Bulletin’s Technical Consultant said that software which encounter problems in connection to the SP1 update can be replaced by using more updated and compatible versions of these software.
Some of the security applications that are affected by the SP1 update are Zone Alarm Security Suite 7.1, Trend Micro Internet Security 2008 and BitDefender Internet Security 10.
