I’m making a chart right now comparing the features of Avast! Free, AVG Free, Avira Free, Microsoft Security Essentials, and Panda Cloud Antivirus. Mainly it is to convert friends and family to Avast!, but I may find another use for it.
I’ve tried to list the features available on the antivirus’. Please help me fill in the ones I couldn’t find, and suggest any features included on any of them that I missed.
Lastly, I was going to give the AV Comparative results for each category, but I realized that they test the paid versions. If there is such a test of just free versions, please let me know.
I couldn’t attach the chart, so I attaches screenshots of it.
Is avast! 5.x able to protect me against phishing?
Yes, the combination of the avast! Antispam and the integrated URL blocking feature in avast! Internet Security 5.x provides sufficient anti-phishing protection.
Yes but don’t includes the anti-spam and firewall, since the most part of the phishing comes from e-mail and the goal is to steal personal/banking information.
Here is a more updated version. Now it includes red or green highlight to compare faster. Hardest thing to find is if any other AV has boot scanning, P2P scanning, IM scanning, script blocking, anti-spam, and fingerprinting. Not surprisingly Avast! is the most feature-rich of the AVs.
Yes.
Also Network Shield filters traffic coming from all applications (not only browsers), and on all ports. For performance reasons, though, it tries a bit harder in case of the well-known HTTP ports.
Network Shield is a protection against known Internet worms/attacks. It analyses all network traffic and scans it for malicious contents. It can be also taken as a lightweight firewall (or more precisely, an IDS (Intrusion Detection System).
Network Shield protects you from internet worms that spread themselves via various security holes in your system.
While Network Shield is checking malicious packets (like Sasser or MSBlast generated TCP traffic) and checking of webpage addresses, Web Shield is scanning the actual transfered data. So anytime you view a webpage, pretty much entire content of that webpage is scanned by avast! even before it actually enters the browsers and also all downloaded files that come through HTTP protocol are also scanned. This way you can prevent known exploits from affecting possibly still vulnerable browser.
Well I’m almost done now. I can’t find anything on other products blocking scripts. What exactly does Avast’s script blocker do, since I know the free version has blocked malicious scripts.
