Avira

Avira Operations GmbH & Co. KG is a German multinational and family-owned company that provides IT-security (Avira software, Internet Security, Privacy, Identity and Performance tools) for computers, smartphones, servers and networks – delivered as both software and cloud-based services.

Avira’s headquarters are located near  Germany. The company has additional European offices in Munich, Germany and Bucharest, Romania. Avira also has sales and marketing offices in Beijing, China and in Burlingame, California, USA 

With an estimated 9.6% of global market share according to and over 100 million customers, Avira was considered the sixth largest antivirus vendor in 2012.

The company supports the Auerbach Stiftung, a foundation created by the company's founder, Tjark Auerbach. It promotes charitable and social projects as well as the arts, culture and science.

Avira periodically "cleans out" the virus definition files, by replacing specific signatures with generic ones, resulting in a general increase in performance and scanning speed. A database clean-out with the size of 15 MB was made on 27 October 2008, causing problems to the users of the Free edition because of its large size and slow servers of the Free edition. To solve the problem, Avira improved the updating process by reducing the size of the individual up-datable files, resulting in the delivery of less data in each update. Nowadays there are 32 smaller definition files that are updated regularly in order to avoid peaks in the download of the updates.

xVDF release

In March 2014 Avira intend to release a new VDF format xVDF (e(x)tended Virus Definition File), the successor of the nVDF. It force on the loading time and size of VDF The xVDF mechanism the update volume of VDF files to a minimum affect. This allows the VDF files keep as small as possible. It also improve the VDF loading time which minimize the CPU resource consumption when loading the smaller VDF files. xVDF also extended the files to more large numbers (256 for Windows; 32 for Android), however the xVDF update mechanism will create an optimize single cache VDF files(local*.vdf) automatically on each update. The scanner engine will only load this single cache files instead of loading and merging all the downloaded VDF files on scan startup. 

Advance Heuristic (AHeAD)

Avira products contain heuristics that can proactively uncover unknown malware, i.e. before a special virus signature to combat the damaging element has been created and before a virus guard update has been sent.

Virus detection involves an extensive analysis and investigation of the affected codes for functions typical of malware. If the code being scanned exhibits these characteristic features, it is reported as being suspicious.

This does not necessarily mean that the code is in fact malware, False positives do sometimes occur.

The decision on how to handle affected code is to be made by the user, e.g. based on his or her knowledge of whether the source of the code is trustworthy or not.

ProActiv

The ProActiv component uses rule sets developed by the Avira Malware Research Center to identify suspicious behavior. The rule sets are supplied by Avira databases.

ProActiv sends information on any suspicious programs to the Avira databases for logging.

Firewall

Avira has removed their own FireWall Technology in Version 2014 and replace it with the management of Windows Firewall (started with Windows 7 and after), because in Windows 8 the Microsoft Certification Program forces developers to use interfaces introduced in Windows Vista.

Protection Cloud

Avira Protection Cloud (APC) was first introduced in version 2013. The aim of APC is improving detection with less impact on system performance due to the use of cloud computing. APC was initially released as a sneak technical preview to selected testers.

After the initial preview, Avira implemented this technology in all paid 2013 products. When APC was first implement in Version 2013, it was only used when the users perform a manual quick system scans. Later, this technology has been extended to the real-time protection, which subsequently improve the Avira's score in the AV-Comparatives September and later Report.

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