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Avast acquires rival AVG for $1.3B to create a security software giant
- Daviey 10y agough, AVG has always been my go-to AV for home Windows users.. I hope the Free edition will remain.. (Even though they have been trying to aggressively convert users to the pay version for years)
- j_jochem 10y agoDoesn't Windows anyway come with a free antivirus solution these days? If so, this might be a good opportunity for Windows users to get rid of the nagware.
- adventured 10y agoWindows comes with a solid piece of software called Windows Defender. It does the job very well. I've been running it for years without any problems. It never gets in the way, runs moderately fast, never bogs my system down, it's free, and it updates very regularly. I don't know what else I would ask for.
- e12e 10y agoBack when I ran windows enough to worry about av software, I had good experiences with "nod32": http://www.eset.com/us/products/nod32-antivirus/ http://www.eset.com/us/products/nod32-antivirus/ I'm not sure if it's grown up to be a bit bloated like the rest now; but it used to do what av should do: scan for signatures fast.
- lghh 10y ago> AVG has always been my go-to AV for home Windows users It probably should not be. They have been MITMing your data and selling it to third parties. http://www.wired.co.uk/article/avg-privacy-policy-browser-search-data http://www.wired.co.uk/article/avg-privacy-policy-browser-se...
- Slaul 10y agoI haven't used AVG or Avast in years. Personally, I have found that Microsoft Security Essentials and Malwarebytes antimalware has been sufficient for me.
- nissehulth 10y agoYes, that seems to be a good combo, using the same. Both AVG and Avast have really annoying upselling techniques, even when you already bought the product there are always addons they are trying to promote. Some popups and notifications are as annoying as the ones Microsoft use to push Windows 10 updates.
- Sarkie 10y agoI used to use MSE as it was so light, but it seems to be awful. https://www.av-test.org/en/compare-manufacturer-results/ https://www.av-test.org/en/compare-manufacturer-results/
- pfg 10y agoI'm quite skeptical about "independent" AV test sites like these, especially when they come to the conclusion that solutions that would essentially make the AV industry obsolete are inferior ("AV industry" meaning third-party AV solutions in this context). There's a big incentive for them to come to that conclusion, otherwise they'd have no reason to exist any further. Relevant quote: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” (Upton Sinclair)
- forcer 10y agoI wonder by how much ego played its role in this acquisition and how much commercial terms. Prague based Avast acquiring its Brno based rival. There have always been rivalrly between those cities too. Definitely the biggest tech transaction in Czech Republic? If we can still say that with so many offices they have worldwide
- ommunist 10y agoBejesus! One should assess environmental impact of CPU cycles wasted on antivirus protection. And based on result of such research - ban operation systems, which architecture allows execution of malware. Yes, a large market of "security" software will be lost. But this will be for good.
- gregmac 10y ago> ban operation systems, which architecture allows execution of malware What's the difference, in architectural terms, between malware and non-malware software? Or are you perhaps suggesting that we should go to a restricted, walled-garden world with a company like Apple as the gatekeeper that checks and approves any piece of software that might be allowed to run on the hardware you are basically renting from them?
- freehunter 10y agoSo we should ban Linux, Mac, BSD, Android, iOS, and Windows... what's left? BeOS? Maybe we should assess the CPU cycles wasted by trolls on the Internet and band anyone who doesn't think about their comment for five seconds before posting...?
- ommunist 10y agoiOS.
- zyx321 10y ago>ban operation systems, which architecture allows execution of malware Ban everything except iPads?
- ommunist 10y agoYou nailed it!
- revelation 10y agoIt's hilarious how such a huge industry has become of something that has soberly assessed very little value or effect. In fact, considering the massive vulnerabilities in AV software discovered by e.g. Googles Zero project, I'm pretty sure the security gain has already slipped into "negative effect" territory five years ago.
- viraptor 10y agoWithout knowing the rates of use of each kind of malware it would be hard to tell. Since the issues in AVs were published by Zero, rather than found in the wild, there's a good chance they were not known, or used only for specific targets. AVs are still useful for "we're employing 1000s of people, some of them are bound to open that bad word document in the email". Useless for targeted attacks, but useful for worms with signatures known for weeks. If you can't deal with the issue in some other way, AVs still give you something.
- cptskippy 10y agoAnything that's been known for weeks can be stopped at the point of ingress such as the email server. They don't require a process actively taking up resources on your machine monitoring disk activity.
- viraptor 10y agoWhat about attachments with passwords? Or https? (assuming we're not using stupid ideas like ssl unpacking proxy)
- cptskippy 10y agoBlocking and filtering email attachments is pretty easy. There's plenty of email gateways that remove attachments from unknown/unsafe senders and replace it with hoops a user has to jump through to get the attachment. This is enough to discourage users from opening most malware. For websites, malware hosts can be easily blocked at the gateway level. This won't protect you if someone manages to host malware on a common site like yahoo.com but will catch the vast majority. These days it's pretty easy to circumvent or disable Antivirus or obfuscate your malware form it. If malware manages to get itself onto a user's machine then you've already lost.
- KevinEldon 10y agoWhile these companies do sell products I thought one interesting point was 'The combined company will have access to “400 million endpoints”'. That's 400 million mobile devices and computers that are collecting information about accessed URLs, attempted exploits, installed software, usage patterns and a bunch of other potentially valuable information for consumer marketing, security analysis, and market analysis.
- groby_b 10y agoHuh. Avast, eh? The same company that sold almost uninstallable 3rd-party crapware in Germany, together with AVG, who're happy to MITM you to sell your data? Do I remember that correctly?
- nikolay 10y agoJournos didn't take the opportunity to title this: "Avast acquires rival AVG for $1.3B to create a vast security software company". Anyway, it's amazing how high the price ticket of a company is that is no match for the real security ones!