The FBI back in November managed to close down a botnet that was created with the help of a malware called DNSChanger. In operation since 2007 it grew to a size of nearly 4 million infected computer systems of which about 500,000 were located in the United States. The operators manipulated the DNS system of [...]

Categories: Security, Software, Windows

It is the time of the year again where security software developers are pushing out the regular yearly updates for their products. Avira has just started the official beta test for their new product line, which includes beta versions of Avira Free Antivirus, Avira Internet Security 2012 or Antivirus Premium 2012. Windows users who are [...]

Categories: Security, Software, Windows

Free products often have a much wider reach than commercial software. This may be especially true when it comes to security software for the PC. This in turn makes the programs ideal candidates for companies like Ask or UniBlue who want their applications to be installed on as many computer systems as possible. Avira recently [...]

Categories: Security, Windows

We all know that it is not a good idea to run multiple real-time antivirus scanners side by side on a system. Most antivirus are actually scanning the system for existing programs before the installation can be completed. The two major problems with running multiple antivirus solutions on a system are performance issues and possible [...]

Categories: Security, Software, Windows

The free version of Avira Antivir displays a popup ad every time it is updated which quickly becomes an annoyance to most users who do not want to upgrade their free copy to a paid version of the antivirus software. We have covered ways to disable the ad popup in Avira before which required computer [...]

Categories: Software, Windows

Phishing is still one of the biggest threats that users face on the Internet these days. Many security programs and web browsers offer phishing protection but these only catch the known phishing attacks which means that users still have to cope with the unknown attacks until they are identified by the applications. Avira has published [...]

Categories: Security, The Web

Malware is a generic term for trojans, viruses, worms, keyloggers, rootkits and other malicious code. The Avira blog has posted an interesting statistic about the malware that gets distributed by urls either in emails, on websites or other ways. Most computer users probably associated file types like exe as dangerous when they encounter them on [...]

Categories: Security

Avira has published a top list of brands that experienced the most phishing attacks in 2009. The top 3 brands according to their chart are PayPal with 32205 threats followed by Chase Bank with 25901 threats and eBay with 18738 threats. Each threat in this case refers to a unique Internet address that was being [...]

Categories: Security, The Web

We ran a post in the beginning of this month (read: Avira Antivir Update Hangs)that mentioned a growing problem that users of Avira Antivir were experiencing. The problem these users were experiencing was a permanent update failure during the virus definition update of the antivirus software. Some users were able to fix these difficulties by [...]

Categories: Security, Software, Windows