AVAST reaches 200 million user milestone

I decided to be a jerk this morning and questioning the point of having x numbers of users. I can understand if we're talking from the vendors' perspectives, but do the users get something if products being popular?

 

None of these securities come any close to the numbers of Chines made security softwares like qihoo, and others.

 

I've used avast! for many years, I think few people had heard of it back then. I thought if anything it was somewhat of an advantage to have a lesser known antivirus as malware makers were likely to target the well-known ones to try to disable them.

However now that it's popular I feel somewhat vindicated in my choice of avast.

 

You know this is an amusing fact. Although it's very possible to make use of the AV to attack its users, I really never heard of anything like an AV being exploited ITW. Only in tests. As far as I can tell, it's the browsers which are being targeted the most. Second is Windows' own components. Just makes me wonder why do they keep targeting the browsers if they can just hijack AV services which run in the highest privilege all the time.

IMO, more users doesn't necessarily mean the product is/has been/will be better. It's not specifically directed to Avast!, but to all security software vendors/developers.

 

Bragging rights...

 

The number of users corresponds with the amount of data fed to the cloud. Ideally, it makes Avast smarter.

 

Ideally. But I prefer to have an AV to have something more advanced than signatures. In that case, I wouldn't need to worry if the AV's market share drops by some % and I don't have to monitor it once in a few while.

 

User choices on prompts is another example of cloud data, it's not just signatures.

 

Congrats to Avast!

 

+1

 

Global Avira Installs : 239 303 383 +
http://www.avira.com/en/personal

.

 

Installs. The number for avast! is ACTIVE users. There can be 400 million installs, but if you uninstall it after 1 hour, they'l still count it. Where avast! stats won't...

 

No offence. Link posted for information only.

 

That counter does not look real to me....

 

This is a pretty pointless thread unless you're a sheep!

Am sure that China's leading AV (what with them having a population of circa 1.3Bn) blows everyone's installs/users 'claims' right out of the water, and talking of water...................

www.water.com has just announced that it's user base has exceeded 6.7Bn!
Now that's something to shout about!!!

 

...a joke.

 

No standardized methodology, why not ...it's leaves the door open to the speculation for market practices...

How many decided to uninstall Avast in the last 30 days..any numbers?

 

At least herd mentality usually keeps the average user safer. Anyways, user population directly corresponds with advanced features that you don't have to monitor. All that data is necessary to build something like Hardened Mode.

 

Congrats to avast! nice

 

Safer you say?

An unknown executable is malicious.
9 out of 10 people don't know if unknown.exe is malicious. 9 out of 10 people executed it. 9 out of 10 people got infected. People are advised to run that executable as well because 9 out of 10 people allowed it?

Really?

 

WOT is the perfect example, unlike your theoretical situation (where does 9/10 even come from?). What you see there is plenty of false positives, but false negatives are rare.

Like I said, it's only another example and far from the only data considered. I could try finding more, but you get the idea right?

 

To simplify it. EAM's BB told me ~90% users allowed certain executable. It was not a malicious one, but since the majority of computer users, including myself, can't tell if an executable is harmless or malicious just by a quick glance, such false negative is very possible. Then the signatures + heuristic will take care of it you might say. Well then, that means you support my statement about users voting system is not going to help much, if not at all.

But that was not what I was saying. My point was if an AV software, Avast! in this case, has more advanced features with some kind of strict policies, the x numbers of active users shouldn't matter much.

 

There's a reason it wasn't a malicious one, because they have ways to tell and spread information:
http://www.techsupportalert.com/content/how-tell-if-file-malicious.htm
https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=351464

Then it wouldn't be user-friendly anymore, making AV's unsuccessful on what most of them built for. Also, the number of users does matter for development funding as well.

 

Of course it was not a malicious executable. I know what I was trying to run. The case is, if a user wants to allow the executable, s/he will run it regardless of what the AV said, even if it was a malware. If it only affects the user's own PC, then it's fine. But with the voting system, the data will be collected and give a result which turns out to be a false negative.

I guess you're right. Although the funding part is more into the vendors' interests, it's true that money is important to keep the programs up and running so the users wouldn't need to say goodbye to excellent software.

Reminds me of the ol' GesWall.

 

That incorrect assumption has broken more than one machine. An unknown executable is unknown. Assuming it is malicious when it is not can be as dangerous as the other way around. I've had more downtime from false positives than I have ever had from actual malicious software.