Due to the fast growing amount of malware out there in the wild our virus definition files grow fast as well. We monitored the situation with our Updates very closely. We realise that users of the free Avira AntiVir Personal had issues fetching the Updates in time recently and did come up with a few ideas how we could solve the problem and to better satisfy the needs of our users.

Two of the results are getting realized today: First, we switch from our current virus definition files (called iVDF) to a new format called nVDF. iVDF consists of 4 VDF files, while nVDF uses at least 32 files – we need to transfer less data for updating our virus definitions effectively in the future.

This means that we need to deliver about 25 MByte to every Avira installation starting today for switching to the new update system. This might lead to some delays for some users, especially for the users of our free version Avira AntiVir Personal. Just to get an idea about what we’re talking here: More than 100.000.000 Users are trying to get the update more or less on the same day. That is more than 2.5 Petabytes (or 2,500 Terabytes) of traffic.

To ease the bandwidth bottleneck, we decided to additionally use a Content Delivery Network (CDN). We were first testing a CDN built up by our current Internet service provider. Shortly after activating the CDN, the redirectors – which redirect the update requests to servers close to the users location – were overloaded and couldn’t answer the requests anymore. The situation was solved a little later on, but the CDN isn’t big enough yet to spread this huge update in time. So we decided to switch to a global player in the CDN market to deliver the update.

We hope that the data is transfered much faster this way so also the users of free Avira AntiVir Personal can enjoy their security solution without any problems: After this Update the situation will get much better for the users of Avira AntiVir Personal.

N.B.: Users of commercial Avira products like Avira AntiVir Premium, Avira Premium Security Suite or Avira AntiVir Professional don’t face any of these problems as they access our servers with reserved bandwidth.

Dirk Knop
Technical Editor

We are currently delivering another huge update to our clients. This leads to the situation that users of the free Avira AntiVir Personal have some issues getting their updates fast.

The situation should get better today or tomorrow. We hope that we have our improved, faster system up and running for the next big update so that this situation won’t come up again!

Please be patient – the update will be over soon! By the way, as usual, users of Avira AntiVir Premium, Avira Premium Security Suite and the Professional products are not affected – they have dedicated download servers and reserved bandwidth available.

Dirk Knop
Technical Editor

The update servers for our free Avira AntiVir Personal are currently under heavy load due to a huge update that gets delivered. Even if we are delivering with 8 GBit per second – whereof up to 1 GBit per second is used by IPv6 traffic alone! – this results in a slow update process for many of the free AntiVir Personal users. The situation should get better over the weekend, it already got better this night for a few hours.

We already increased bandwidth and made further optimizations to our servers. Also we’re working on a permanent solution to better serve the users of our free Avira AntiVir version – this may take a few weeks though.

Users of our Avira AntiVir Premium and Avira AntiVir Professional products are not affected by this issue.

Dirk Knop
Technical Editor

Amazing! Avira’s free antivirus solution, Avira AntiVir Personal available at our www.FreeAV.com web site, is now getting 10 years old! For ten years, we added an additional security layer around companies by protecting the employees personal computers from malware infections for free.

The free version always offered the latest antivirus techniques available, and the best detection rates and superb protection due to heuristics detections. For us that is a good reason to celebrate. For ten days our present to our customers is an additional runtime of 10 months if you buy a usual 1 years license of our premium products or the small business suite.

Happy birthday, FreeAV!

Dirk Knop
Technical Editor

Today we released the Update EU2 for all Avira AntiVir 9 products. The developers fixed a bunch of small bugs which some users occasionally ran into. The update is being distributed via automatic update function, so there is no need for users to do anything.

To name a few of the bugs fixed: Our developers further improved the IMAP support of the MailGuard. For example, in rare circumstances an application error in Thunderbird occurred when using 1&1 IMAP accounts.

Some issues with the firewall of Avira Premium Security Suite have been solved as well. These mostly are of cosmetic nature like firewall dialogs did not fit on the 800×480 pixels display of the EeePC. Some trusted publishers weren’t always properly detected in applications, resulting in more firewall prompts for user action. For the server versions the update corrects some errors, too.

Additionally we’re planning to release more international versions of AntiVir 9 tomorrow. We’re going to publish the software versions Avira AntiVir Premium, Avira Premium Security Suite and Avira AntiVir Professional in Italian, Spanish, French and Russian. The free Avira AntiVir Personal will be available in Italian and French then as well!

Dirk Knop
Technical Editor