Lavasoft Releases Dual-Engine Ad-Aware Total Security

Lavasoft has just announced the release of new versions for its award-winning, Ad-Aware suite. Several modifications are to be mentioned as the company no longer treads the previous path.
Ad-Aware protection bunch comes in three different flavors, with the freebie leading the way, closely followed by the two paid editions. This time around, the freebie includes full antivirus protection: “Here at Lavasoft, it’s part of our founding principle that all computer users must have the power to protect themselves online. By continuing to offer the Ad-Aware Free version and now adding anti-virus protection, we are ensuring that our users throughout the world have a one-stop product that delivers core malware protection: anti-spyware, anti-virus and anti-rootkit,” says Johnny Widerlund, Senior Technologies Director at Lavasoft.
The Plus version has been replaced by a different suite, Ad-Aware Total Security, a complete set of tools bent on offering your system not just the best security against malware.
For increased protection against malware, Lavasoft select GData as their technology partner for Ad-Aware Total Security. Thus, the tool relies on two antivirus engines, which can work in tandem or separately. Among highlights of the bundle are easy-to-configure personal firewall, rootkit removal system, anti-spam protection, webmail protection, as well as protection against phishing attacks. Ad-Aware Total Security includes special features including parental control, backup and system tuning functions.
Ad-Aware Total Security also offers a comfortable file shredder designed to securely remove your data, in a manner that prevents its recovery. A simple drag and drop of the item on the file shredder desktop icon is enough to get rid of it.
The prices set by Lavasoft for the two products are $29.95 for a one-year single user subscription for Ad-Aware Pro, while Ad-Aware Total Security sells for $49.95. The difference between the two is pretty steep, the Ad-Aware Total Security representing a new turn in Lavasoft’s security products.

Kaspersky Lab Predicts Malware Epidemics

Kaspersky Lab, a leading developer of secure content management solutions, has successfully patented technology in the USA that allocates the potential scale of malware epidemics to be accurately predicted in order to prevent them from spreading.
"The patented technology works by examining statistical data about threats received from a global monitoring network.
Emerging epidemics can be recognized by the number of incidents occurring during a specific period in one location or another. It makes it possible to pinpoint the source of an epidemic and forecast its likely propagation pattern.
Protective measures can then be implemented by countries in the path of the epidemic. This slows the proliferation rate considerably and offers effective damage limitation, according to chief intellectual property counsel Kaspersky Lab.
The technology has a number of advantages over other similar systems, including the ability to trace the source of the threat, generate protective measure and simulate the spread of an epidemic, she said.
Today's malware has the capacity to spread in millions of computers infected in an instant as an epidemic sweeps across the Internet. This can take down huge swathes of infrastructure, bringing information highways to a standstill and leaving systems vulnerable to data leakage which in turn opens the door to large scale fraud. Detecting malware on computer that is infected during an epidemic has little or no effect. What is needed is a reliable method for estimating the potential scale and direction of an epidemic, an early warning system, and that is exactly what the new technology developed by Kaspersky Lab's Yury Mashevsky, Yury Namestnikov, Nikolay Denishchenko and Pavel Zelensky, is capable of doing. The technology was granted Patent No. 7743419 by the US Patent and Trademark Office on 22 June, 2010.
Kaspersky Lab currently has more than 50 patent applications pending in the USA, Russia, China and Europe. These relate to a unique information security technologies developed by the Company's personnel.