Panda Cloud Antivirus

With over 140.000 active beta testers of version 1.9.1 (!!!) and after a long wait Panda Cloud Antivirus Beta 1.9.2 is finally here. This new beta release incorporates not only a lot of bug fixes as reported by the large beta community but also new features such as a new firewall platform and intrusion detection system. This new beta version includes better malware disinfection capabilities and even lower impact on system performance. Last but not least Panda Cloud Antivirus Beta 1.9.2 is compatible with the recently released Windows 8 Release Preview.

If you have the previous Panda Cloud Antivirus Beta 1.9.1 installed this new beta version 1.9.2 will be upgraded automatically for you. We will release the automatic upgrade in a controlled manner over the period of approximately one week. So there is nothing for you to do, simply sit back and let Panda Cloud Antivirus Beta upgrade itself. If you have a Home or Started Edition Operating System you might see a prompt to reboot. Other than that the upgrade is completely transparent.

Some of the most notable changes implemented for 1.9.2 are the following:

• New firewall platform for Windows Vista, Windows 7 and Windows 8.
• Intrusion Detection System protection against network attacks.
• Ability to adapt firewall behaviour by zones.
• Registration of the firewall component in the Windows Security Center.
• Deactivation/activation of the built-in Windows Firewall when the Panda Cloud Antivirus firewall is activated/deactivated.
• New technologies for improved malware disinfection.
• Improved detection of in-memory malware.
• Improved disinfection of packed/compressed malware.
• Improved quarantine management.
• Process monitor without the URL monitoring.
• Activity monitor in the main interface window.
• Last detection show in the main interface window.
• Added advanced configuration to enable/disable detection of potentially unwanted programs.
• Added advanced configuration to enable/disable background scan after cache synchronization.
• Added advanced configuration to enable/disable on-demand scan within compressed archives.
• Added advanced configuration to exclude elements by extension.
• Improved scanning architecture and integration with Quarantine and memory scanning module.
• Integrated new toolbar with Google search instead of Yahoo.
• Button to hide the promotional banners shown in the main interface.
• Improved integration with the Windows Security Center for the antivirus component.
• Improved integration with Collective Intelligence of unknown and new malware samples.
• Performance improvement to lower system impact when treating files within Explorer and Recycle Bin.

If you don’t want to wait for the automatic upgrade you can manually install Panda Cloud Antivirus 1.9.2 by downloading it directly from http://acs.pandasoftware.com/cloudantivirus/beta19/PandaCloudAntivirus.exe. As always you can provide feedback, send us suggestions and discuss with our QA Department about this beta version in our Beta Support Forum.

It is impressive that over 140.000 beta testers have helped us improve the product so much over the last year. Again our most sincere “THANK YOU” to all our beta users and hope you enjoy this new 1.9.2. We promise this new beta won’t be as long as the 1.9.1 beta and very soon we will all be able to enjoy the final Panda Cloud Antivirus 2.0 release

Finally the new Panda Cloud Antivirus beta is here, getting us closer and closer to the expected Panda Cloud Antivirus 2.0 release. Version 1.9.1 incorporates a full fledged firewall with application and system rules. This new firewall and its settings is available from a new tab off the main GUI.

The full firewall included in this beta version is a smart community-based firewall which will automatically assign inbound and outbound communication privileges to processes. The automatic assignment is performed depending on its risk assessment as well as the direction of the communication which is being initiated. So if an OUTBOUND connection is being made by a Secure or Low Risk process, the process is allowed to communicate automatically. Alternatively if a process is deemed riskier, a prompt will ask the user to choose whether to allow or block the communication. A similar although stricter approach is used for INBOUND connections.

The risk assessment of executed processes is shown in the Process Monitor window of the main GUI as shown in the first picture of this blog post. This is calculated automatically based on many different conditions, such as safe lists, digital signatures, telemetry and prevalence, automated analysis of processes, etc.

However users can also manually manage the firewall rules by adding new ones, editing, deleting, importing and exporting rules and prioritizing certain rules over others. This is easily done from the Program Control window under the firewall tab of the main GUI as shown in the next picture.

Finally there’s also a lot of improvements in the antivirus part of the program, as always targeted at making Panda Cloud Antivirus even lighter and faster, as well as a usual batch of bug fixes. The full changelog can be seen below.

Today is a very special day for us at Panda Security for two reasons. First because today marks the two-year anniversary since we released the first beta of Panda Cloud Antivirus, the first free antivirus from the cloud. To celebrate this, we’re releasing another beta version today, Panda Cloud Antivirus Beta 1.9.

The objective of this beta version is to test the interception of networking traffic in order to build cloud-based firewall functionalities in future versions. In this beta the networking interception is applied to both HTTP and POP3 traffic. Even though the program incorporates a Process Monitor which keeps track of HTTP web traffic requests on a per process basis and allows for per-process blocking, no traditional firewall functionality is provided in the beta, only interception.

In order to promote thorough testing of this version, we are giving away 10 Amazon.com $100 gift certificates to the most active beta testers who report bugs in the Panda Cloud Antivirus Beta Support Forum. The winners of the gift certificates will be selected at the close of the promotion by the Support Forum Moderators amongst the users with the most amount of new (unknown at the time of posting) bug reports. Note that the beta may still be ongoing after be promotion ends on August 1st, 2011. In addition there will be PRO license codes given away to other active beta testers as well.

New Features
- Process Monitor functionality and traffic history reporting.
- Ability to block a process by sending it to Recycle Bin.
- Blocked processes can be restored from the Recycle Bin.
- Ability to disable/enable BackgroundScan after signature cache synchronization.
- Ability to exclude file extensions from the on-access scanner.
- Exclusion of Potentially Unwanted Programs (PUP) detections.
- New graphical installer. Logs are kept under %TEMP%\StubInstaller.log.
- New Toolbar without ID Protect & Shopping and with Toolbar Cleaner.

Read more about this beta, download and install from http://www.cloudantivirus.com/forum/forum.jspa?forumID=50202

   
Panda Cloud Antivirus Beta3 is finally available for download. Please visit Panda Cloud Antivirus’s new website at http://www.cloudantivirus.com to download this latest version.

Some of the most important and notable changes over the previous version are the following:

• New improved interface.
• New website design and services.
• New Collective Intelligence Real-time Activity Monitor.
• New Technical Support Forums.
• Fixed slowness of PC after install.
• Fixed most cases of scan stuck at X% and errors during scan.
• Fixed “Problems with Internet connectivity” popup message.
• Fixed BackgroundScan by deactivating many unnecessary operations.
• Improved performance based on cache optimization (much less CPU utilization).
• Improved performance based on memory management (less memory consumption).
• Improved management of Recycle Bin and restoration of disinfected objects.
• Improved quick scan option.

Panda Cloud Antivirus Beta3 introduces a new website at http://www.cloudantivirus.com where people are able to create accounts and use those credentials to login to their Panda Cloud Antivirus product instead of using license keys which need to be renewed every year. This allows users to access the online Support Forums and other Panda Cloud Antivirus services which we’re still building.

     
We have been circulating a limited Preview Release of Beta3 which supports Vista 64bit and Windows 7 (32 and 64bit). This Beta3 Preview only has additional platform support. No other functionality which is currently being developed for Beta3 is included yet in this Preview Release.

Basically we’re interested in getting as much feedback from the 64bit and Windows 7 community as possible. If you’re one of these guys or gals, we want to hear from you. Please send all feedback regarding this Preview Release to beta@pandasecurity.com or send your comments to this blog post.

Downloading
The download link is the following:
CloudAntivirus-Beta3-0.08.83-Preview.exe
EDIT: changed link to point to a more reliable server.

Installing
If you have a previous version of Panda Cloud Antivirus, you’ll need to manually uninstall that first, reboot and then install the Beta3 Preview.
Note: The Beta3 Preview can also be installed on XP/Vista 32bits, even though we’ve not tested it in these platoforms.

Workarounds
Remember that under x64 the registry entries for the different workarounds mentioned in this blog are different. They are the following:

Activating advanced logging:
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREWow6432NodePanda SecurityPanda Service Host]
"tracePath"="C:\Logs_CloudAV"
"traceEnabled"="1"

Disabling BackgroundScan:
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREWow6432NodePanda SecurityPanda Service Host]
"BackgroundDisabled"="-"

Enabling Exceptions:
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREWow6432NodePanda SecurityPanda Service HostExceptions]
"CreateMiniDump"=dword:00000001
"ToMessageBox"=dword:00000001

    
We have been getting some reports from users that after running a manual on-demand scan it seems to be stuck or stopped at x%. The error code that is returned is different than “1″.

In order to help us troubleshoot this problem please follow these steps:

1.- Download and extract the Scan-Dump.zip file into a new folder, for example C:Test.
2.- Browse to the C:Test directory and execute the file called “Start.bat“.
3.- Run a manual on-demand scan from Panda Cloud Antivirus to try to reproduce the problem.
4.- If the problem is successfully reproduced, execute the file “Stop.bat“.
5.- There will be a file called “Session01.etl” in the C:Test directory.

If you can reproduce this problem please post the Session01.etl file to http://www.cloudantivirus.com/forum.

Many thanks for all your help & support !!
   

 
If you’re having any type of problem with Panda Cloud Antivirus (a recent one we’re getting is the Error Code 1 while scanning) you can help us troubleshoot it by enabling exceptions and having Panda Cloud Antivirus create minidumps when it runs into a problem.

You can enable exceptions easily by creating the following registry key:
   Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
   [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREPanda SecurityPanda Service HostExceptions]
   "CreateMiniDump"=dword:00000001
   "ToMessageBox"=dword:00000001

For those less familiar with manipulating the Windows Registry you can simply download and execute the following Exceptions.reg file which will automatically make the change in the Registry for you:
Enable Exceptions

Once enabled, any exception caught will be shown to you in popup windows similar to the following ones:

If this happens, you can find the minidump in the following locations:

• XP: c:documents and settingsall usersProgram datapanda securitypanda cloud antivirus
• Vista: c:program datapanda securitypanda cloud antivirus

Simply compress (in a ZIP or similar) the minidump and send it to us. We have enabled an FTP account where these can be uploaded to.
FTP Server: 212.8.79.111
Username: betatester
Password: d8PvVVdTQzWv

Don’t forget to drop us a note at http://www.cloudantivirus.com/forum if you do upload a minidump so we can provide you with an answer or fix after we analyze your upload.

Again thanks to all that are helping us improve Panda Cloud Antivirus !

Some users upgrading from Beta1 to Beta2 version have come across problems during the uninstall/reinstall upgrade procedure. In order to try to make things easier on users we have created an uninstaller standalone application for Panda Cloud Antivirus.

IMPORTANT: only use this generic uninstaller on PCs with Panda Cloud Antivirus. If this uninstaller is executed on PCs with other Panda products (Panda Antivirus Pro, Panda Internet Security, etc.) it will have negative effects and will leave the PC in an unstable state.

Simply download and execute the uninstaller in the following ZIP file:
Download Cloud Antivirus Uninstaller

If you’re still having problems with an uninstall procedure and would like the manual instructions feel free to contact us at the Technical Support Forum (http://www.cloudantivirus.com/forum).

Some Beta1 users have misunderstood the popup message that was recently shown by Panda Cloud Antivirus, announcing the availability of the Beta2 version.

The feedback we received is that some users thought the software was going to stop being free. I wanted to post this to clarify any confusions that might have been created by this notification.

This notification is merely announcing the availability of the Beta2 version. Some considerations to take into account during the beta period:

• As soon as a new Beta version is announced (Beta2, Beta3, etc.) the previous Beta version will stop connecting to Collective Intelligence and updating its cache.
• Users can of course download the new Beta version for free.
• After the Beta period is over and Panda Cloud Antivirus version 1.0 is released it will continue being free without any loss of functionality whatsoever.

Sorry if this notification has caused any confusion.

We have received some comments and reports from Beta2 users of version 0.08.82 of slowness of their PCs and lots of hard drive I/O activity from PSANHost.exe.

We are tracing this problem back to an interaction of the new synchronous OnAccess cloud-scan with the BackgroundScan. This interaction seems as it could be the source of the slowness of the system even though we continue investigating it. Basically this occurs under certain circumstances when both scans are consuming the same resource. We’re in the process of redesigning these two scan tasks so they are optimized in the use of critical system resources to avoid simultaneous accesses to common resources.

As a workaround you can disable the BackgroundScan altogether. Disabling this task does not compromise the security level of the PC as the OnAccess scan guarantess the protection of the machine. If you apply this workaround simply make sure to run an OnDemand scan periodically to ensure there are no inactive & latent malicious files in the drive.

To disable the BackgroundScan simply create the following registry entry and reboot the PC:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREPanda SecurityPanda Service Host]
"BackgroundDisabled"="-"

If you are not used to playing around with the registry, simply download and execute the .REG file in the following file:
http://blog.cloudantivirus.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/background_disabled.zip

As we continue investigating this problem, if you are affected by this problem and are able to send us debug information please get in touch with us. Thanks again to everybody for your help