What's new in avast! version 4.5
Version 4.5 of avast! antivirus brings a number of enhancements to our industry leading antivirus software. This page summarizes the most important ones.
A more complete (though considerably less detailed) list of new features can be also found on the avast! Home/Professional Revision History page.
Support for new archives and packers
The scanning engine of avast! 4.5 adds support for a new set of file archivers and packers of executable files. The wide archive support of avast! 4.1 was extended with new support for ISO, CHM, 7ZIP, RPM, CPIO and TNEF archives. A change has been also made to the Win32 Exec unpacker which now covers considerably more packed executables (especially AsPack'ed ones).
Network Shield
A new resident protection module was added to avast! 4.5: the Network Shield. This provides protection against known Internet worms/attacks. It analyses all network traffic and scans it for malicious contents. It can be also taken as a lightweight firewall (or more precisely, an IDS (Intrusion Detection System)).
The Network Shield is only available on NT-based systems (Windows NT/2000/XP/2003).
Support for new P2P and IM programs
The IP and P2P Shields have been extended so that they now protect a much broader range of messaging/P2P applications. Namely, the following instant messaging programs are now supported: AIM (AOL Instant Messenger), Gadu-Gadu*, Gaim*, ICQ*, Miranda*, mIRC*, MSN/Windows Messenger, Psi Jabber*, Odigo*, Trillian, Yahoo! Messenger; the following P2P program are now supported: Ares*, BearShare, BitTorrent*, CZDC++*, Direct Connect, Direct Connect++, eDonkey*, eMule*, iDC++*, iMesh, Kazaa, Kazaa Lite, LimeWire*, Morpheus* Opera's DC++*, Overnet*, Shareaza*, SoulSeek*, StrongDC++*, WinMX*
Protection of the applications marked by an asterisk (*) is available on Windows NT, 2000, XP, and 2003 only).
Transparent email (SMTP/POP3/IMAP4) scanner
The Internet Mail provider has been enhanced so that it is now able to filter email traffic automatically, without the need of reconfiguration of mail client programs. This is realized by employing a low-level network filtering driver that is able to intercept all communication streams and divert them to the avast! mail scanner.
In previous versions of avast!, users could use the so-called Mail Protection Wizard - an easy application that helped them to set up their mail clients to use avast! without the need of reconfiguration of the account details. The Mail Protection Wizard is now deprecated (except for Windows 9x/ME based systems where the transparent mail scanning feature is not available).
Support for 64-bit Windows
The new avast! 4.5 Home/Professional now fully supports the 64-bit Windows platform (avast! Server Edition has been supporting Win64 (both AMD64 and IA64) platforms since version 4.1). ALWIL Software is anticipating a massive take-up of this platform as Windows XP 64-Bit Edition will support up to 32 GB of RAM and 16 TB of virtual memory, enabling applications to run faster when working with large data sets. Applications can preload substantially more data into virtual memory, allowing rapid access by the 64-bit extensions of the processor. This reduces the time for loading data into virtual memory or seeking, reading, and writing to data storage devices, making applications run faster and more efficiently.
Regular (32-bit) antivirus applications are unable to operate correctly on the 64-bit Windows platform because they rely on 32-bit kernel-mode drivers. The new avast! uses native 64-bit drivers, delivering the same level of protection as in the 32-bit Windows environments. The installation package is the same for 32-bit and 64-bit versions - the setup program automatically detects the operating system it is running on and installs all necessary files.
New language packs
Commitment to internationalization is one of the key benefits of avast!. During the last 2 years, avast! has been translated to a number of languages and version 4.5 adds additional language modules. To date, the following language versions are provided: English, Czech, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Japanese, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Spanish, Turkish.
TCP scanning daemon
The Professional and Server Editions now include a special TCP scanning daemon used previously solely in the Linux/Unix version of avast!. The daemon is a simple TCP listener (listening on a known TCP port) that accepts and processes certain commands. These commands include SCAN to scan a specific file or directory.
The protocol used by the TCP scanning daemon is well-documented and can therefore be easily used to integrate the engine with a number of external applications. Most of the time, interaction with an AV software is realized by launching a command-line scanner; while this is a convenient solution for demonstatration purposes, in real-world scenarios this aproach has severe limitations (such as very low performance). Use of the TCP daemon is not only easy to use from virtually any environment (including languages like Java and Perl) but also features very high throughput.
