Panda Cloud Antivirus

We are happy to announce that AV-Test.org recently released their independent testing results of their latest January/February 2012 test runs. These tests put antivirus and security products through a thorough real-world testing scenario which is broken down in three big areas: Protection, Repair and Usability.

The results couldn’t be much better for Panda Cloud Antivirus 1.5.1 as we outscored all other free antivirus products tested (and many of the paid and full suites!). Thanks to all our users who are providing feedback in our Support Forum to help us make The Best Free Antivirus!

If you haven’t seen it already, Panda Cloud Antivirus cloud-scanning backend, Collective Intelligence, has reached its 200 millionth file analyzed in the last few hours.

Being one of the first cloud-scanning backends in the AV industry, Panda’s Collective Intelligence processes automatically over 250.000 new files every day. It is able to automatically analyze new files, determine if they are malicious or not, create signatures for the malicious ones and respond to threats on user’s PC’s in real-time without requiring AV signature updates. In addition it also is able to create heuristic determinations for completely new and unknown malware which it has never seen before without actually having the file, as well as using prevalence to make determinations and prioritizations, making Panda’s Collective Intelligence the most advanced cloud-scanning technology in the market.

More information:
http://www.cloudantivirus.com/en/threat-information/
http://press.pandasecurity.com/usa/news/panda-security-processes-200-millionth-malware-file-via-the-cloud/

Hot off the trails of the great debut of Panda Cloud Antivirus at AV-Comparatives with an Advanced+ rating, now Panda Cloud Antivirus Free Edition is also taking part of the Full Product / Real-World tests of AV-Test.org.

The results are pretty good. Both Panda Cloud Antivirus Free Edition and Panda Internet Security 2012 achieved some of the top scores in protection. In addition Panda Cloud Antivirus achieved very good scores for usability, with very little slowdown of the test computers and zero false positives (when the industry average for this test was 17 false positives).

The full reports can be read online for both Panda Cloud Antivirus Free Edition and Panda Internet Security 2012.

AV-Comparatives.org just published its latest detection test. This test takes into consideration detection of recent malware as well as false positives. This is the first time that Panda Cloud Antivirus Free Edition participates in AV-Comparatives.org independent tests.

We’re happy to announce that the results couldn’t be much better. Panda Cloud Antivirus Free Edition achieved the highest rating (Advanced+) by being one of the AVs with the highest detection and lowest false positive ratings of the 20 products tested. Panda Cloud Antivirus Free Edition even got higher scores both in detection and false positives than paid-for security solutions from Kasperspky, ESET, McAfee, Trend Micro and Symantec and also higher scores than other free solutions by Avast and AVG.

You can read the full report at AV-Comparatives.org testing site.

Finally the new Panda Cloud Antivirus Free Edition and the new Panda Cloud Antivirus Pro are here!

After only 7 months since the release of PCAV 1.0 in November 2009, which has been download by almost 10 million users, the next major release of PCAV is finally available in two flavours: Free Edition and Pro.

Download your copy from http://www.cloudantivirus.com. NOTE: there’s no need to uninstall the previous version. The new version will automatically upgrade the one you have installed.

New features and changelog:

• Behavioural blocking. Proactive, signature-less, protection against malicious actions typically used by malware. Generic blocking of malicious PDF/DOC/XLS/PPT/WMV/etc. droppers. Compatible with both 32 and 64bit Operating Systems.
• Behavioural analysis (PRO only). Runtime analysis and blocking of running processes. Compatible with 32bits Operating Systems as well as for 32bit processes under 64bit systems.
• Advanced configuration. Ability to turn on/off and tweak the behaviour of the different engines, cloud responses, advanced logging, recycle bin settings, exclusions, etc.
• Self-protection of the AV processes and configurations.
• Re-do detections that were previously un-done so that they are detected again.
• Automatic upgrades (PRO only) to new engine versions and new features automatically and transparently.
• Improved offline protection. Default deactivation of Windows Autorun.
• USB vaccination (PRO only) Automatic vaccination of USB memory keys and hard drives.
• Ability to run alongside other AVs and Anti-Spyware. Can now be run alongside other security tools and scanners.
• Full scan option. Added option to run a full PC scan easily.
• More languages. Added 9 new languages. PCAV is now available in a total of 20 languages: English, German, French, Spanish, Dutch, Italian, Portuguese, Swedish, Greek, Polish, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Russian, Brazilian Portuguese, Turkish, Hungarian, Japanese, Slovak, Norwegian and Finnish.
• Quicker download & install experience thanks to new stub-installer which is 300kb in size.
• More options for restoring neutralized files. More flexibility when recovering neutralized files, allowing for automatic and manual recovery, exclusions, configuration of the Recycle Bin automatic emptying, path to recover, etc.
• Improved handling of known good files to reduce false positive rates by the new behavioural engine and automated classification from the Collective Intelligence servers.
• Optimized installation background scan by using adaptive low-priority scans.
• Improved scanning progress information by showing when a large compressed file is being scanned to avoid the perception that the stuck is stuck.
• Fixed certain situations when the PandaCloudTestFile.exe was not being detected even though the PC was correctly connected to the Internet.

Today marks an important day in the life of Panda Cloud Antivirus, the best free AV for two reasons. First of all this month is the one-year anniversary since we released the first beta. But more importantly today Collective Intelligence, the cloud-scanning backend infrastructure, has hit an important milestone: 100 million unique files analyzed. This means that our backend servers have automatically received, analyzed and created detection and disinfection routines for over 100 million unique files.

Some internal Collective Intelligence statistics that may be of interest to some of you:

• Types of files
• Malicious:  60.90%
• Goodware:  31.26%
• Under analysis:  7.84%
• New daily files
• Daily new unique files:  74009
• Of which are malware:  45738
• Backend servers
• Size of Collective Intelligence databases:   2.4 TB
• Daily logs from cloud-scanning server:   190 GB

Thanks to all Panda Cloud Antivirus users for helping us grow the Collective Intelligence community and improve the protection for all of us.

Today we are releasing a new version of Panda Cloud Antivirus, version 1.0.1. This version is basically a cumulative-fix release which incorporates Hotfix-1, Hotfix-2 and some small additional improvements.

The most notable improvement is that we have gotten rid of the initial account registration which used to be mandatory for first-time installs. Panda Cloud Antivirus will not ask for account during install anymore. Only if you want to participate in the Cloud Antivirus Support Forums will you need to create an account.

I have Cloud Antivirus 1.0 already installed. Do I need to download & install this version?
Not really. This new version incorporates hotfixes which you probably already have installed anyway. To check if you have them installed, simply browse to “C:\Documents and Settings\All Users” (XP) and you should see a subdirectory called “HF_PCA_somenumber”.

I have the hotfixes installed but I still have some problems with Panda Cloud Antivirus. Should I install this version?
Yes you might want to give it a try. Below you can find some more detail of what this version fixes which is not included in the existing hotfixes. In order to install this version on top of the one you already have, first uninstall your current version, then reboot and finally download & install the new version from http://acs.pandasoftware.com/cloud/CloudAntivirus.exe.

What’s the changelog of this version 1.0.1?

1. Preactivated version does not require account creation during install
2. Fix for certain conditions of stuck quick & full scan
3. Improved cloud-heuristic detection for unknown malware – From HF_2
4. Improved prevalence algorithms for priorization of new malware – From HF_2
5. Fix of problems scanning certain files in system directories – From HF_1
6. Fix for loss of connectivity after malware disinfection involving LSP – From HF_1
7. Improved cloud-heuristic detection – From HF_1

   
At the same time we released Panda Cloud Antivirus Beta3 we also published a new website with two interesting new services; a Collective Intelligence Activity Monitor and user-driven Technical Support Forum.

I really encourage all of you to start using the Support Forums as we have our entire Cloud Antivirus project teams from support, QA and development participating and looking forward to interact with you guys.

Don’t be shy and visit our new support forum, drop us a note or let us know if you’re having any problems. Even if you simply want to say hello or drop suggestions for future versions, we’ll be happy to hear about it.