Agnitum licenses firewall technology to Avast

[system]

Agnitum licenses firewall technology to Avast

Parts of Outpost firewall and protocol parsing technologies are embedded into Avast’s comprehensive Internet Security solution

St. Petersburg, Russia — December 6, 2012. Agnitum, the PC security expert and manufacturer of the Outpost range of security products, is glad to announce a licensing contract with a prominent antivirus vendor Avast Software. Avast now takes advantage of Outpost’s best-of-breed firewall technology for the purpose of its all-in-one security product.

AVAST logoAgnitum’s technology now available to the licensee involves personal firewall, attack detection, parsing of HTTP as well as POP3, SMTP and IMAP protocols.

Given the complexity and diversity of today’s threats, users need protection that controls the main propagation route — their Internet connection. Zero-day threats, one of the newest and most difficult to detect, are becoming more frequent, and an appropriate response must be in place for users to have adequate security when they go online.

Agnitum is one the leading technology licensors in the security industry. Its technologies are being currently employed by top market players. The company has provided flexible opportunities for third-party licensing, offering antivirus, firewall or proactive protection modules either as a rebranded solution or based on the SDK since the year 2000. Among the major benefits offered by Agnitum’s licensing program are best-of-breed preventive mechanisms, native compatibility with both 32- and 64-bit Windows, reduced time-to-market, and smooth operation of the technology core in a third-party environment.

AVAST Software, the makers of avast! Antivirus, protects over 170 million users around the world, and has integrated Outpost’s firewall and content filtering technology into its all-in-one Internet security solution.

“Agnitum’s personal firewall technology has long been the standard by which others are judged, and we are pleased to be able to enhance our users’ Internet security protection with this proven solution”, comments Ondrej Vlcek, CTO at Avast.
About Agnitum

Founded in 1999, Agnitum Ltd. (http://www.agnitum.com) has been committed to delivering and supporting high-quality, easy to use security software for over a decade. Agnitum’s commercial solutions for the home market are Outpost Firewall Pro and Outpost Antivirus Pro, securing personal and family computers; and Outpost Security Suite — an all-in-one Internet security solution. Dedicated to global e-security, Agnitum also offers free versions of Outpost Firewall and Outpost Security Suite to secure users’ system, network connections and critical data. Outpost Network Security ensures centrally-manageable endpoint protection and reliable performance for SMBs, and Outpost Antivirus Service provides antivirus protection via monthly subscription to 150,000 ISP subscribers.

For more information and to request review copies of Outpost Pro, please contact:

Agnitum International PR
http://www.agnitum.com/news/2012-12-06-agnitum-firewall-technology-avast.php

Good News for Avast users! One of the best firewalls! ;D ;D

[CraigB]

Probably why there’s been so much silence about the up-coming avast 8, this might all be incorporated into the new version ???

[YLAP]

Very interesting news indeed… 8)

[system]

Let’s hope that makes the firewall more usable. I especially hope they changed the fw rule storage file format, because the current XML gets corrupted too often for my liking, especially when one configures some custom rules. That’s my biggest pet-peeve about AIS, closely followed by the stupid overcomplicated application rules UI.

[DavidR]

Yes, very interesting as I have had Outpost in various versions from the Outpost free v1.0 through to the latest regular release of Outpost Firewall Pro. So I have had the outpost firewall for even longer than avast (eight and a half years), but I can’t remember exactly when I got outpost free v1.0.

From the very early days of Outpost firewall I have recognised it as a very good firewall offering the same kind of configuration and flexibility as I subsequently found in avast antivirus.

[Charyb-0]

This is a great choice in firewalls and users will be pleased by this. I wonder how much of the technology will be used? I’m ready to see the final product.

[schmidthouse]

This has all been very quiet. :-X
I don’t think any Secret Service could keep stuff like this quiet. ;D

[system]

First of Congratulations Avast, will really be looking forward to the Avast! 8.0 release.

Hope that Avast! will incorporate some of the technology in Zero Day Prevention into their Behavior Shield, making their Behavior Shield a little bit more User-Interactive and more active in fighting Zero Day Malware.

[system]

First, I actually don’t think is a good idea.

Licensing = a chunk of avast revenue is given to another company which can be used to come up with new technologies although Outpost is a good firewall.

Second, I thought avast was always about home grown technology? How is it suddenly they are switching to other people’s technology? Is avast engineer s unable to come up with good firewall until avast have to incorporate another’s company product?

Sorry for the harsh words. But it just don’t feel right for me for avast to incorporate another company’s technology.

[CraigB]

@LunarWolf post:9

First, I actually don’t think is a good idea.

Licensing = a chunk of avast revenue is given to another company which can be used to come up with new technologies although Outpost is a good firewall.

Second, I thought avast was always about home grown technology? How is it suddenly they are switching to other people’s technology? Is avast engineer s unable to come up with good firewall until avast have to incorporate another’s company product?

Sorry for the harsh words. But it just don’t feel right for me for avast to incorporate another company’s technology.

Best thing in the world that they could have done imo, Agnitum is at the top of there field in firewall technology and avast can only benefit from this in making there AIS version more secure and usable, will be very interesting to see the end result.

[JuninhoSlo]

Agnitum shouldn,t announce this news. It,s supposed to be a secret until Avast 8 (AIS8) came out. Otherwise this is a great news and I,m really looking forward to see Avast Internet Security8.

Thank you.

[schmidthouse]

@LunarWolf post:9

First, I actually don’t think is a good idea.

Licensing = a chunk of avast revenue is given to another company which can be used to come up with new technologies although Outpost is a good firewall.

Second, I thought avast was always about home grown technology? How is it suddenly they are switching to other people’s technology? Is avast engineer s unable to come up with good firewall until avast have to incorporate another’s company product?

Sorry for the harsh words. But it just don’t feel right for me for avast to incorporate another company’s technology.

It’s ALWAYS got to be about the “most secure security software” for the user not who developed the technology first.
As long as all involved are working from a position of integrity and trust, we all win IMHO

Edit

[system]

What about the addition resources for the technology? Isn’t it kind of wasted and avast users are mostly free users. If avast is a paid AV, it will be a totally different story. They will have plenty of money to splash.

Now, for avast to license hitmanpro/emisoft/malwarebytes cleaning abilities.

[system]

i think it could be good and bad, outpost is one of the best there is but has grown heavier is recent years, avast internet security is one of the lightest suite i use and feels that way, other products that also use the outpost firewall have become heavier and imo more sluggish. i just hope this doesnt happen to avast is. its very light and i hope they can keep it that way. me personally i liked the firewall they has especially for my average client it was easy to use and had great simple app control. you want to block something simply go and block it. where as outpost itself can tend to overwhelm some at times.

i like the fact of having a better firewal and i hope it helps detection etc but please keep it light and please do not over complicate for the average user like many suites do now as some have little to no basic app control or if they do its hard imo for a normal user to use them. we will have to see how this all goes.

[schmidthouse]

@LunarWolf post:13

What about the addition resources for the technology? Isn’t it kind of wasted and avast users are mostly free users. If avast is a paid AV, it will be a totally different story. They will have plenty of money to splash.

Now, for avast to license hitmanpro/emisoft/malwarebytes cleaning abilities.

AIS has always been a paid for Security Suite.
The firewall technology I assume would be used to enhance/improve the firewall in the paid suite.
Only Avast Free is free the others you pay for,

[Lisandro]

@JuninhoSlo post:11

Agnitum shouldn,t announce this news. It,s supposed to be a secret until Avast 8 (AIS8) came out.

How did you know this?

Hope this improve the firewall part of the suite and for sure it will. Userfriendly + advanced options, mobile network management (tethering).
Of course, the security improvement is welcome also (behavior shield).

[Charyb-0]

I didn’t read where it included proactive protection. I guess we will have to wait and see.

[DavidR]

@zfactor post:14

i think it could be good and bad, outpost is one of the best there is but has grown heavier is recent years, avast internet security is one of the lightest suite i use and feels that way, other products that also use the outpost firewall have become heavier and imo more sluggish.

I don’t know where you get this from as it isn’t my experience, I have been using it from way back as outpost free v1.0 through to the latest regular release of Outpost Firewall Pro and have never felt it to be heavy.

Just a raw down and dirty example op_mon.exe the main process is only in the region of 21MB of RAM and I never see its cpu activity get particularly high.

[system]

This is good. The current firewall honestly isn’t comparable to the best solutions out there.

@DavidR post:18

@zfactor post:14

i think it could be good and bad, outpost is one of the best there is but has grown heavier is recent years, avast internet security is one of the lightest suite i use and feels that way, other products that also use the outpost firewall have become heavier and imo more sluggish.

I don’t know where you get this from as it isn’t my experience, I have been using it from way back as outpost free v1.0 through to the latest regular release of Outpost Firewall Pro and have never felt it to be heavy.

Just a raw down and dirty example op_mon.exe the main process is only in the region of 21MB of RAM and I never see its cpu activity get particularly high.

I’ve never used OF myself so I don’t really know how heavy it is. 21 MB may sound like a small amount but Comodo for example uses way less (D+ disable, firewall mode only).

http://www.abload.de/img/cfz9uns.png

Although, the antivirus is far from being as efficient as their firewall part when it comes to CPU usage. Good firewall but AV part… Far from Avast.

[DavidR]

Well 21MB is small when you consider it to other applications, my anti-spam is running at 103Mb, thunderbird at 166MB, firefox at 511MB (and that is only one of its entries, dropbox at 50MB.

So it rather depends on your perspective of heavy, but RAM is their to be used as that improves performance so it isn’t constantly swapping out to the hard drive pagefile.sys. For me the main thing would be CPU activity (nowadays RAM is cheap and plentiful) and that is negligible.