Cloud Computing and Avast.

Avast Free Antivirus / Premium Security
1

The few new pretenders (pun intended) have made use of cloud computing… http://www.immunet.com/protect
http://www.cloudantivirus.com/

They claim astonishing levels of memory usage along with detection rates that are unheard of…(or so ive heard ;)).

Avast includes a community option, How much does the community feature enable avast in detecting new threats and dealing with them?

Atleast it has a community option as in Immunet Protect.

Does avast have any plans to incorporate further such features or any new innovations in it?

2

you’re welcome to tell me what the community option in Avast does, because I haven’t got a clue, thanks :wink: (sounds a bit like what the behavior shield is already doing… on 32 bit OS at least)

edit: OK, I see you’re asking the question yourself. So again, for the community option, I don’t know ;D As to the behavior shield, it includes some rule sets and watches the system, is able to report suspicious changes to Avast (no user intervention, no alert) and if needed Avast can react by introducing a counter-attack in the next VPS/engine update. As said there’s nothing to see or expect (yet) for 64 bit OS…

3

well, i was actually wondering out loud, thinking what does the community option when enabled, does. Does it take information regarding detected signatures and update the detections? I really have no clue, only measured assumptions, which might be wrong.

4

I edited my post while you were posting…

5

From the Help.

By checking the box on this page, you can participate in the avast! community and share information of a technical nature on a need-to-know basis. This does not concern personal information of any sort and is strictly security-related information concerning, for example, malware that avast! has detected while running on your computer, actions that have been blocked etc. This information will be used by avast! to improve its detection ability and technical support for the benefit of the whole avast! community. By participating in the avast! community, you will also have access to all the community information and statistics about the latest malware attacks.

Exactly how this is implemented is not addressed, nor how we have access. I’m guessing that Avast used this feedback from the installed Avast programs to improve it’s Behavior Shield blacklists, etc.

6

Right, thanks for the info, Gopher John! But i was also wondering if that the virus detection data would also be utilized by the Guys at avast, to find if any new viruses are out there.
just a thought.

7

Probably. Avast would use any detections to check whether signatures are effective. Anything that Behavior Shield picks up and the Web Shield should have but didn’t may be included in future signature updates, etc. But, that’s only conjecture on my part, too.