Can someone tell me if there are plans to add Azureus to the P2P Shield? I see talk about it here dating back some time but no Azureus in the P2P list. It should be there really - Azureus is widely used.
I’d also appreciate an opinion on choice of product - I’m running the free Home version and remarkably feature rich it is too - especially for free! Are there any really compelling reasons to seriously consider buying the Pro version for home use? Script scanning perhaps…please advise.
I otherwise use a product called SpywareBlaster to shut the gate on spyware nasties and scan with AdAware and ewido when I remember (I don’t use ‘live’ resident spyware blocking as such).
I have no idea on avast’s plans for azureus P2P other than currently that it is excluded in the Internet Mail scanner because many used use the email ports to communicate causing connection timeouts because it isn’t using POP3 protocol when using the email ports 25, 110, 119, 143 which avast monitors.
You can do a forum search for azureus and you will see some that had problems and why it is ignored for email port scanning.
There are many reasons to purchase the Pro offer the Home version, it is more flexible but it has to meet your needs, avast Home V Avast Pro differences http://www.avast.com/eng/av4_version_comp.html.
Can you tell me what use Avast makes of heuristics during manual scanning & the Standard Shield? I can only find mention of it in the settings for Outlook/Exchange.
I don’t work for Alwil, I’m just a user like yourself, so I can’t speak for Alwil.
I would say the word most, isn’t totally correct, heuristics if not properly implemented can cause more problems that they might solve. If a poor model is used it could result in many false positives. What is called heuristics in the email scanners is more monitoring suspicious activity/situations, common means of infection/deception than what a full description of heuristics would give.
The Alwil team use a number of generic signatures (usually indicated with -gen in the virus/malware name) in the on-access scanners to try and detect families so new variants can be detected in that way. This is likely to increase and behavioural checks, etc. are planned for version 5 of avast. This still won’t be called heuristics as far as I’m aware.
I’ve been using avast for over two and a half years without a problem, I also exercise safe hex, have a good firewall, use an alternative browser to IE, keep my OS and security software fully up to date and use multi application protection.