avast!

4 Professional Edition
DataSheet

avast! 4 Professional Edition represents a collection of high-end technologies created to give you unrivaled protection against computer viruses. This document will show you some of its excellent feature enhancements.

Resident Protection
Resident protection, i.e. the real-time protection, is one of the most important parts of antivirus protection today. avast! features a powerful resident module that is able to detect a virus before it has any chance of infecting your computer. avast! Professional Edition contains resident protection of the file system and a resident module for e-mail scanning. The file system protection ensures that no virus will be allowed to execute on startup. It oers a wide range of settings including: the possibility to specify that les will be scanned during copying, or that the scanning will include files with a given set of extensions only. E-mail protection consisting of two independent modules: Firstly, there is a generic scanner working on the SMTP/POP3/IMAP4 protocol level, which is capable of protecting any existing e-mail client that uses these protocols. Secondly, there is a special plug-in for MS Outlook only which is completely transparent and requires no additional settings. There is also a new feature in version 4 which allows heuristic analysis of e-mail attachments. It is extremely useful in protecting against new unknown viruses and worms that are not detected by the usual means. The heuristic module performs a thorough investigation of every e-mail message and watches for suspicious signs that might announce virus presence. When the number of those signs exceeds the user-defined level, the message is considered dangerous and the user is warned.

Antivirus Kernel
The new version of avast! antivirus was designed to provide a high-performance, extremely scalable engine, with outstanding 100% detection rates. Its fully multithreaded model, rock-solid stability and low system footprint make it suitable for use even in the most demanding, mission-critical systems. The engine also provides support for many file archive formats (ZIP, ARJ, RAR, TAR, GZIP etc.) and is even able to scan these archives recursively. The avast! antivirus engine is certified by independent authorities, such as the ICSA Labs, and has also won the prestigious VB100% award multiple times.

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User Interface
avast! 4 Professional Edition features two distinct user interfaces: the Simple User Interface and the Enhanced User Interface (gure 1), giving you all the features for extensive scanning.

Integrated Virus Cleaner

Since version 4.1, avast! professional includes a seperate product called Virus Cleaner. This is a tool designed for the complete removal of the most common infections from already-infected computers. So now avast! is capable of reliably healing, and not just detecting, the most common malware. The number of viruses and worms supported by the Virus Cleaner is constantly growing to oer customers the best possible healing power. For emergency purposes, we also oer Virus Cleaner as a standalone product, capable of running without installing avast!.

Script Blocker
The resident protection of the Professional Edition includes an additional module not contained in the Home Edition, which is known as Script Blocker. This module watches all the scripts being executed in the operating system (called WSH scripts - Windows Scripting Host). It also scans all the scripts ran as a part of a web page within your web browser (Internet Explorer, Netscape Navigator and Mozilla).

gure 1 The Simple User Interface is very easy to use, giving you the ability to perform common tasks very quickly. It can be used to start on-demand scans, work with their results, change basic program settings etc. It is fully skinnable, meaning that you can change the look and feel of the application whenever you like. Unlike in the Simple User Interface, scanning in the Enhanced User Interface is performed by so called tasks. After defining a task, including various parameters, areas to scan, what to scan and how to scan, etc. You can then, possibly repeatedly run it. Each task then generates a list of results allowing you to review them later. Another important feature closely connected with tasks is the Scheduler. This feature gives you the ability to schedule tasks to run either once or periodically. It is also possible to set all the remaining scanning options, (task) which are not available in the Simple User Interface.

Automatic Updates
Automatic updates are another key point in virus protection, both the virus database and the program itself can be updated automatically. The updates are incremental, and only new data is downloaded, thus reducing the transfer time. The typical size of a virus database update is approximately of 20-80kb, the program update usually has approximately 200-500kb. If your Internet connection is consistent, the updates are performed completely automatically in fixed time intervals. If you connect to the Internet only occasionally, avast! watches your connection and tries to perform the update when you are online.

ALWIL Software a.s., Prbn 76, 100 00 Praha 10, Czech Republic phone: (+420) 274 005 666, fax: (+420) 274 005 889 http://www.avast.com

avast! 4 Professional Edition DataSheet

Push Updates
A special feature of the Professional Edition is PUSH updates. It is a dramatic change in the philosophy of updates. Usually every installed program checks for updates periodically and when a new version is available, downloads it. PUSH updates however are initialized by our servers; they result in your computer quickly responding and performing the necessary update. The system is based on the SMTP protocol. The updates themselves are controlled by the avast! resident e-mail providers (MS Outlook and Internet Mail). The whole system is protected by asymmetric ciphers and is resistant to unauthorized use.

System Integration
avast! antivirus features seamless integration into your system. The scanning can be started directly from Windows Explorer by selecting a folder and selecting the corresponding choice from the menu. Another interesting feature is a special screen-saver that performs scanning for viruses during its run-time. avast! antivirus works together with your favorite screen-saver, so you dont have to change to anything. Another new option is the boot-time scan (Windows NT/2000/XP/2003 only). It is important in the case that a virus is suspected to be active on your computer. The boot-time scan is performed before the virus may activate, stopping the virus influencing the scanning in any way.

- 32 MB RAM - 50 MB of free hard disk space - A functional MS Internet Explorer 4 or higher is required for the program to work

- 64 MB RAM - 50 MB of free hard disk space

avast! is registered trademark of ALWIL Software a.s. Microsoft and Windows are registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation. Sun and Solaris are trademarks of Sun Microsystems, Inc. Red Hat is a registered trademark of Red Hat, Inc. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds. All other brands and products are trademarks of their respective holder/s. Copyright 2007 ALWIL Software a.s. All product information is subject to change without notice.

ALWIL Software a.s., Prbn 76, 100 00 Praha 10, Czech Republic phone: (+420) 274 005 666, fax: (+420) 274 005 889 http://www.avast.com

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Virus Chest
The Chest can be thought of as a Quarantine area on your disk, having special properties that make it a safe, isolated place, suitable for storing certain files. You can work with the files in the Chest with security restrictions. The main properties of the Virus Chest are to provide complete isolation from the rest of the operating system.

Command-line Scanner
Experienced users may like another Professional Edition feature which is the command-line scanner. The scanning can be controlled by many arguments and switches and can be used as a pipe filter. Also a special STDIN/STDOUT mode is available. The module is intended to be used in BATCH programs. Its output is the same as the output from the Enhanced User Interface tasks (including the report files).

Main Features
ANTIVIRUS KERNEL
- Almost 100% detection - Outstanding performance - Reasonable memory requirements - ICSA certified

RESIDENT PROTECTION
- Standard Shield protects the file system - Generic SMTP/POP3/IMAP4 scanner - Specific MS Outlook plug-in - Heuristic analysis in e-mail modules - Script Blocker

USER INTERFACE
- Memory test during the program startup - Very intuitive Simple User Interface - Enhanced User Interface (MS Outlook style) - Testing whole disks or selected folders - Defining and running of antivirus tests - Working with the scan results - actions on infected files - Storing the scan results (history) - Virus encyclopedia - Log Viewer - Various appearances - skin support - Running from Explorer context menu - Antivirus screen-saver - Boot-time scan - Command-line scanner

WEB SHIELD
- Able to monitor and filter all HTTP traffic coming from the Web sites on the Internet - Acts as a transparent HTTP proxy and is compatible with all major web browsers

NNTP (Newsgroup) SCANNER

- Ability to scan NNTP (Usenet Newsgroup) traffic

REPAIRING
- Limited capability of direct repair (especially macro viruses) - Repairing fi les using automatically generated Virus Recovery Database (VRDB)

OTHER
- Task Scheduler - News delivery system: iNews - 4 default preset tasks for typical scanning - Possibility to set any test details - Report files - Outlook Express archive unpacker

UPDATES
- The system of incremental updates guarantees low traffic - The updates can be completely automatic - Standard updates twice a week - PUSH updates immediately when published

Minimum System Requirements

FOR A COMPUTER WITH WINDOWS 9x/Me/NT 4 SP3+
- PC 486

FOR A COMPUTER WITH WINDOWS 2000/XP/2003

- PC Pentium