At AVAST, we not only provide you with free protection, we also reward you for registering it! No, no, we’re not crazy. 

You help us immensely by recommending avast! Because of that, we don’t need to advertise, and so we want to reward you even more – e.g., Internet Security licenses, t-shirts, iPods, or a trip to Prague. (see the Winners Section at: http://www.avast.com/community )

And as we informed you several weeks ago, we celebrated our 160,000,000^th registration of avast! Free Antivirus.  The lucky person who won is Fabricia from Brazil. When she received an email to her native Brazil that she had won an all-inclusive trip to Prague for herself and a friend, she was of course skeptical, as junk mail scams with surprising  winner announcements are so common these days. But since she had just registered her avast! Free Antivirus she  was curious and asked her brother for his opinion. After a few phone calls and finding the announcement as well on avast.com, she knew it was legitimate.

Best of all, selecting the friend to accompany her was easy, as Fabricia had recently become engaged! So Fabricia’s trip to Prague – from being our 160 millionth user registration – will now also be her honeymoon.

We at AVAST are proud to be a part of it.

New Zealand’s state MetService website was hijacked by malware (apparently a fake antivirus) during a particularly high time for traffic, according to a stuff.co.nz news article. The article has prompted more than 100 comments in the first day, mostly from understandably upset site visitors who may have picked up the malware on their computers.

Here, however, I just want to show you one comment, as it’s nice to see this sort of feedback in the real world. It’s no secret that we typically offer our free version in tests against our competitors’ paid-for versions, but even the results from independent testing facilities don’t feel as rewarding as  feedback like this from our user community:

Fortunately for those MetService users who were not using avast!, they can install it now and run the avast! boot-time scan — and that should do the trick.

We are happy to announce that our Facebook fan page for avast! antivirus has reached a whopping 300,000 fans!

avast! antivirus's facebook community increase - Aug2010 to Aug2011

Read more…

Last week’s post about the stylish cycling shirt caused a big stir with lots of questions, comments and also emails from people asking for a sample 

For starters, an old friend called me with a proposal that his company could produce those shirts for us in Italy!  Well, we need to see about the price but I certainly thank you for the tip.

Someone else suggested that we should send these shirts as a gift to other AV companies – and he suggested AVG where several top managers are cycling enthusiasts. I think this is great idea – wouldn’t that be nice advertising!

Read more…

PRAGUE, Czech Republic, August 10, 2011 – The website of Super Glue Corporation (supergluecorp.com) makers of the world-famous adhesive, has been infected with malware. And after five days, this infection seemed to be sticking like glue.

The infection was a Trojan JavaScript Redirector which takes visitors through a series of infected sites to the final location in Russia, most likely a distribution center for fake antivirus. Read more…

Not all browser nets can catch the same phish. One Friday evening, just before I wanted to go home, I received an interesting email.

It contained sentences like “ We recently reviewed your account, and suspect that your PayPal account
may have been accessed by an unauthorized third party” and words like “protected“, “security” and “unauthorized“.  Of course, at the end of the email, there were directions to click on a “Paypal” link to update information like login name and password.

Read more…

A couple of clearly highly motivated biking enthusiasts in our office (‘enthusiasts’ is probably an understatement …)  have somehow persuaded Martin Novak,  our in-house graphic design master,  to spend some of his working time designing their own custom cycling shirts.  Since the design looks really cool, a couple of other not so highly motivated biking enthusiasts, including me, have asked to be added to the print production.   Of course my motives are purely professional – after all it is really nice branding!

Btw, the new t-shirt also resurrected our original intention of making AVAST t-shirts and other items available to our fans.  We are now reviewing the services of Cafepress, Printfection, Zazzle and other companies that specialize in the production and delivery of branded collateral.  If you have any firsthand experience with those companies or other recommendation please let us know.

The second half of 2011 got off to a great start for AVAST Software (even if it was rough in terms of Prague’s “summer” weather, which been more like an out-of-place autumn). We began the third quarter with a record 165 million user registrations and (not long after launching our avast! Free Antivirus for Mac beta) in July we launched our new business security line. As for what’s next, CNET’s Seth Rosenblatt give a preview of our other upcoming security solutions here.

In other news, research by the AVAST Virus Lab uncovered an alarming trend in Adobe Reader version usage and a surprising percentage of Microsoft XP-based rootkits. Read more…