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Ukrainian avast! in the Final Frontier
With the release of the summer blockbuster Star Trek: Into Darkness, I started thinking about the Star Trek universe, Trek-nology, and what it would be like if avast! Antivirus was adopted by Starfleet. Wouldn’t it be amusing to hear the voice of the computer echoing through the bridge, “avast! Virus Database has been updated”? 
As Captain Picard would say, “Make it so!”
Our beloved U.S.S. Enterprise, space station Deep Space 9, the far-flung Voyager, and even the sentient android Data experienced computer malfunctions, some of them caused by a virus. Here are a few episodes that come to mind as I imagine the possibility of avast! in the Final Frontier.
ST: TNG The Contagion
Captain Jean-Luc Picard is a student of archaeology. When a distress call comes in from the U.S.S. Yamato, engaged in an archeological investigation looking for the legendary planet Iconia, the Enterprise responds right away. But not in time to save the 1000+ crew and ship from destruction due to a computer virus. The weaponized virus was transmitted by a scan from an Iconian probe and caused dangerous systems failures by overwriting software. The Enterprise becomes infected when it downloads the Yamato logs. During the investigation, a Romulan Warbird shows up and an interstellar incident becomes imminent.
Shields up!
Apparently Starfleet’s ships don’t come equipped with virus protection software because the Yamato was destroyed when hostile, malicious threats took over their computer system, and the Enterprise was threatened as well. Avast’s shields protect different aspects of computer functions. If anything suspicious is detected, the file system shield will prevent the program from being started or the file from being opened to prevent any damage being caused to your computer and data.
avast! Photo Contest: How can you BE FREE?
No one wants to spend time worrying about the security of their laptop or mobile phone. When things go wrong, it is very…well… frustrating.
Avast! Antivirus protects your computer and mobile phone around the clock, so you can BE FREE to enjoy your life. Show us what you do when you are free from worry and frustration. Take a photo of what it means to you to BE FREE, and enter it into our avast! Be Free photo contest. It’s easy. You can enter on our Facebook app, or through your own Twitter or Instagram account using the hashtag #avastBeFree. Once your photo is entered, invite your friends to vote for it in the photo gallery. The top voted photos will win a new Nexus 4 mobile phone or a Nexus 7 or Nexus 10 tablet!
Loosing your mobile device does not mean it’s lost – install avast! Anti-Theft to become protected!
In 2011, we at AVAST released our mobile device theft protection tool, avast! Anti-Theft, we wanted to change the way mobile devices are being protected from being stolen or abused. We did not know if people would like it, we did not know how well avast! Anti-Theft would perform in actually protecting mobile device owners from the bad guys.
Now, 1 1/2 years after release, we receive tons of feedback from users around the globe. Every day we hear of several customers who were able to recover their phone or their tablet by using our solution. Honestly, this makes us happy, more than you could imagine. We see that our tool actually makes sense and gives REAL value to our users. Which is the dream for every developer.
Of course, sometimes phones just got lost and were easily recovered. But sometimes we really hear nice recovery stories that could be described as almost or real adventures. As is the story of our user FridgeWheeL who managed to recover his device even from a foreign country. We decided that the story needs to be shared, so thanks for FridgeWheeL to give us a summary. Enjoy:
To the Avast Team
I believe to give credit where credit is due, and due to this belief I want to give a big thanks to the Avast team for their assistance in recovering my stolen mobile handset.
I live in South Africa & if your phone is stolen and you do not have insurance, the chance of seeing your phone ever again is very grim. Stolen phones here get exported or sold to foreigners since you are able to black list your phone to prevent any further use of the phone on our local networks.
With the above in mind & since I did not have insurance on my mobile phone due to high costs at the time when I bought my Samsung Galaxy S3 on a two year contract, I installed the free version of Avast Mobile Security and ran through the Anti-theft setup as a precaution should my phone get stolen.
On the 2nd of March 2013 I was at a Samsung Galaxy World Tour music festival where my phone was pick pocketed amongst the crowed. This was honestly a very bad experience for me since I did not have insurance and still have to pay a hefty monthly payment up until December 2014.
Having completely forgotten that I installed Avast Anti-Theft on my mobile, I tried finding my phone via the stock tracking applications and tools that came with my mobile but all of these were dependant on an active internet connection on my stolen mobile phone. These tools could not assist me in any way and I made peace with the fact that my phone was lost forever.
On the 1st of May 2013, my fiancé at the time (my wife now
) received an SMS that a SIM card change was detected on my phone and another SMS followed with a link on the approximate location based on the mobile network service of the new SIM card in my phone. With this information it clearly showed that my phone was in Lusaka Zambia. I then got a hold of the Police in Lusaka Zambia and explained to them the whole situation. Within 45 minutes after speaking to the Zambian Police, they located my phone and opened a case and followed procedures to ensure that the phone was indeed mine.
I provided all necessary information to the Police as well as the tracking SMS’s from Avast and the Police confirmed that the phone was indeed legally mine. They happily couriered my phone back to South Africa and my mobile is due for collection tomorrow from my local post office.
Special thanks to Avast & the professional service from the Lusaka Zambian Police.
- FridgeWheeL
FridgeWheeL, thanks for your message and your permission to publish it! Such news always encourage us to develop even more great stuff to get it our to our millions of users. Now, we hope you’ll never loose your phone again. But if it happens at least you know you’re protected .
The avast! Anti-Theft development team.
avast! fans are Winners
Today, we received an email from one of the four winners of last December’s Facebook game Member Gets Member. The object of the game was to introduce your friends to avast! Antivirus by inviting them to our Facebook page. When your friends liked our page, you earned points, and earned points gave you the chance to win a cool new Windows Surface tablet. That’s exactly what Micah, from the Philippines, did.
Hello Julia!
Micah with her prize from Avast!
Attached here is my picture with the Microsoft Surface tablet. I am very thankful of having such reward. But not only that, I am very thankful also of using Avast as my antivirus because it’s very fine and does excellent performance for my devices. I hope you guys will still make such events or contests like this Member gets Member game and keep on giving such awards for those Avast supporters and users.
Thank you so much and more power!
Micah L
One of the Microsoft Tablet Winner
We are glad to learn that you are enjoying your Microsoft Surface, Micah, and we’re happy to inform you that tomorrow a new opportunity to win will begin.
NEW PHOTO CONTEST
The #avastBeFree Photo Contest lets you express your creativity in photos. All you do is interpret our slogan avast! Be Free and enter your photo on our Facebook app, or through Twitter or Instagram using the hashtag #avastBeFree. We are giving away eight Nexus devices – mobile phones and tablets, plus 100 free license of avast! Internet Security. You could be a winner!
The #avastBeFree Photo Contest begins tomorrow, Wednesday, May 15. Learn more about the contest from our blog post.
Watch the video here
#avastBeFree: AVAST is looking for its next Photo Contest Winners!
One year ago, Avast launched avast! Free Antivirus for Mac, and celebrated with our first photo contest. The results were outstanding – we received 50,000 photos with “APPLE” as the topic, and our Facebook page became the 5th fastest growing page worldwide during the first week of the competition!
Your enthusiatic reponse told us that:
- You are playful
- You like to compete for nice prizes
- You love social media and avast
Enter our new Photo Contest and Win!
We are happy to introduce a new photo contest. This time, however, we leave it up to your creativity. Your assigment is simple: Show us your creativity and visual interpretation of our slogan avast! Be free!
To make it even easier, this time you can enter not only via Facebook, but also upload your best photo via Twitter and Instagram using the #avastBeFree hashtag.
Follow avast! on Instagram and meet our teddy bear
The AVAST Software social media team love challenges; it stimulates our creativity. 
Despite the fact that there is hardly any way to photograph antivirus software, we decided to establish an official AVAST channel at Instagram. “A picture is worth a thousand words”! We fell for this inspiring and creative social network, so please check us out!
Meet avast! teddy bear
Just like avast! Antivirus, our teddy bear can be found all over the world. He is a great protector, a cute travelling companion, and loves to Be Free. Read more…
Regents of Louisiana spreading Sirefef malware
I was given a suspicious website link pointing to the website belonging to Board of Regents of State of Louisiana. This link points to the main website hxxp://regents.la.gov/, followed by /wp-content/upgrade/<numbers>.exe, where <numbers>.exe represents several random numbers, followed by EXE extension.
Massive U.S. cyberattack planned by Anonymous
Source: http://www.bankinfosecurity.com/
“In the cross hairs of anonymous”
The hacktivist group Anonymous announced phase one of a massive cyberattack, called Op USA, on U.S government and banking websites scheduled for next Tuesday, May 7. The White House, the NSA, and the FBI are included on a list of high profile government targets, and 133 financial institutions including the Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and Citibank are listed as banking targets.
Communicating through Pastebin on April 21, an Anonymous spokesperson stated, “Anonymous will make sure that this May 7th will be a day to remember.” They wrote that the reason for the attack is “…multiple war crimes in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan…”.
Anonymous posted a list of targets and mapped out the method of attacks writing, “You can not stop the internet hate machine from doxes, DNS attacks, defaces, redirects, ddos attacks, database leaks, and admin take overs.” Read more…
avast! Antivirus gets cameo role in Movies vs. Life viral video
A YouTube video called Movies vs. Life compares scenes embellished with movie magic to their real-life equivalents. We like to think that an avast! Antivirus cameo during a computer hacking scene (pay attention around 0:22 seconds) is one of the reasons that this hilarious video has gone viral.
A round of applause from avast! to French comedy troupe Golden Moustache for producing this funny video.
Make sure you turn on captions for the English subtitles.
High profile site scares users
We come across a plenty of malware reports every day. Sometimes we have to deal with some special cases, where a respected vendor is involved. This time it was the Dell driver download site.
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