This year AVAST celebrated 25 years in business and reached an astounding 200 million users. We released our leanest, fastest antivirus protection ever, avast! 2014, and we protect over 50 million Android devices with antivirus and anti-theft protection.

The team of experts at AVAST published 512 blog posts in 11 languages, posted 21,075 stories on Facebook, tweeted 1,200 times, and created videos that were watched over 10 million times on YouTube.

Major milestones reached

AVAST Software has been in existence for 25 years now. From its challenging beginnings behind the Iron Curtain to the innovative idea to give away avast! Antivirus for free to becoming the most downloaded program in the world with more than 200 million users, it has been a great run for AVAST - and it continues to get better! This video summarizes it for us.

Most popular Facebook posts
AVAST’s 3.6 million Facebook fans appreciate everything from virus alerts to notifications about social engineering scams to fun and contests. Did you know that a small team of only 5 people manages social media for AVAST? In 7 languages?!

Malware alerts

In June, news about the ZeuS Trojan spreading among Facebook users got people’s attention. Over 26,000 of our Facebook fans shared this message with their friends. All avast! Antivirus products detect and block Zeus if a user tries to install or run the .exe file.

Social engineering scams

The Facebook Red scam, along with Facebook Black and Facebook Pink, tricked people into clicking malicious links just to change the color of the Facebook interface. AVAST users know better, and nearly 14,000 shared it with their more gullible friends.

Fun stuff

Our Spanish users liked this cartoon meme about avast! Antivirus audio updates coming at the wrong time. With 8,000 of our fans sharing it with their friends, it got half a million knowing laughs. Here’s a translation:

- What are we??

- Avast! Antivirus!!

- What do we want??

- Report when virus database is updated!!

- When do we want it??

- Whenever your headphones are at maximum volume!!

Most popular videos

Our AVAST YouTube channel videos have been viewed over 11.3 million times. Did you know that basically one person, Daniel Coca López, is responsible for creating all our videos?

Our users want to know how we find new computer viruses, so we made this informative summary, which has been viewed over 6 million times.

avast! Mobile Security has become one of the most popular security apps for Android smartphones and tablets since we released this video.

A little Halloween prank turned into a bit of magic in this ‘Tossing pumpkins’ video. 38,000 people watched it around Halloween.

Biggest stories on our blog

The AVAST blog is where the experts from around the company share malware analysis, company news, product information, social media tips, and contest announcements. This year 38 different writers shared their knowledge with millions of readers.

Malware reports

With increasing frequency, the avast! Virus Lab ran into occurrences of ransomware. Attackers use this malware exploit to encrypt your data or lock you out of your PC and demand payment in exchange for restoring your access. CryptoLocker got the most headlines, and experts say it also was the most successful, raking in $30 million in just 100 days. Another nasty variant claimed to have found child pornography on you computer. This year the Virus Lab also wrote analyses on – Reveton, Lyposit, and Urausy ransomware.

avast! Virus Lab research that received attention among the security community included Analysis of Chinese attack against Korean banks, published in March, which led to a recent presentation at AVAR 2013 (Association of Anti-Virus Asia Researchers) held in Chennai, India; in April, Banking Trojan Carberp: Epitaph? was published which led to an RSA Conference talk; in August the first exploit of Linux was discussed in Hand of Thief ungloved. That article was a basis for a reserve paper accepted by Virus Bulletin 2013 and also referenced by German IT journal heise.de. The discovery of the Napolar Trojan was mentioned by PC World and also referenced on the ESET blog.

As we saw from the videos, avast! users like to know how avast! Antivirus products work. One of the most popular blogs of the year was a question from a user, What goes into the Virus Chest, and how do I remove what’s inside?

Jeno (Jolli) A7734

Social networks

Our users also want to stay on top of news about social networks, especially when it relates to privacy issues. How to use new graph search on Facebook? explains Facebook’s enhanced search options.

Other things

The people of AVAST Software also care about issues outside of our regular business. When we found out about Auschwitz survivor Menachem Bodner’s search for his lost twin brother, we hoped that one of our millions of users could provide a clue, so we wrote about it in Auschwitz survivor seeks twin brother by “going viral”. This story particularly resonated with our Russian community, Бывший узник Освенцима ищет своего брата-близнеца с помощью «вирусных» технологий

Thursday is our favorite day

Every Thursday since August, one of our talented graphic designers, Matěj Porteš, has created images for #tbt, aka Throwback Thursday. On Thursdays, we get to share the product of his imagination on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. Here's some of our favorites:

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Thank you for using avast! Antivirus during 2013 and recommending us to your friends and family. For all the latest news, fun and contest information, please follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Google+. Business owners – check out our business products.