The following is an email we received from Avast. It must be very embarrassing for a company which makes security software for consumers can’t secure their own Web site. If we were Avast users (which we are not) we’d have second thoughts.
Dear Cloudeight,
The AVAST forum is currently offline and will remain so for a brief period. It was hacked over this past weekend and user nicknames, user names, email addresses and hashed (one-way encrypted) passwords were compromised. Even though the passwords were hashed, it could be possible for a sophisticated thief to derive many of the passwords. If you use the same password and user names to log into any other sites, please change those passwords immediately. Once our forum is back online, all users will be required to set new passwords as the compromised passwords will no longer work.
This issue only affects our community-support forum. No payment, license, or financial systems or other data were compromised.
We are now rebuilding the forum and moving it to a different software platform. When it returns, it will be faster and more secure. This forum for many years has been hosted on a third-party software platform and how the attacker breached the forum is not yet known. However, we do believe that the attack just occurred and we detected it essentially immediately.
We realize that it is serious to have these usernames stolen and regret the concern and inconvenience it causes you. However, this is an isolated third-party system and your sensitive data remains secure.
All the best,
Ondrej Vlcek
COO AVAST Software
So what is left? Are there any good free antivirus programs left out there? I use the free AVG antivirus, but ONLY the antivirus, and not their whole security suite, even though they constantly try to get users to upgrade. These security suites use up too many resources.
AVG is close to being Malware. AVG is already a browser and search engine hijacker. The days of good free antivirus are pretty much over; in fact the days of the Web being a big free candy store are pretty much over. And consider virus infections are very rare, good malware protection is just as important. Malware infections can ruin your computer, ruin your computer experienced, open your private information to criminals, cost you a lot of money, and cause you a lot of lost time. We have found malware on about 85% of the computers we have worked on via Cloudeight Direct (and we’ve worked on thousands) but we have only seen virus on a few – less than 5%. While AVG, AVAST, Norton, McAfee, Trend Micro and others claim to remove and prevent malware, they don’t. Malwarebytes was, at one time, a wonderful program to remove malware, but unless you wanted to pay for it, it did not protect you from malware. Malwarebytes lost their way and now we never know whether they’re the good Malwarebytes or the bad Malwarebytes, so we don’t trust them.
We don’t recommend Emsisoft just because we get pad to recommend it. We recommended it because it’s the best real-time anti-malware and it’s also a very highly rated anti-virus. And considering if you buy it from us it costs less than $3 a month, it’s a great bargain.
If we found a free anti-virus with real-time malware protection that worked as well as Emsisoft, we would certainly tell you about it, but we do not know of any. We do know we have worked on computers protected by Avast, AVG, Trend MIcro, Norton, McAfee, Panda, Sophos, and Kaspersky, which were free from viruses and Trojans — but drowning in malware.
Yes, I too would like to know of a good free antivirus program that I can use in place of Avast !
For years we recommend free antivirus programs but there is no longer a reliable one out there. Emsisoft antivirus/antimalware is the ONLY one we recommend now. http://thundercloud.net/emsisoft Reliable security software is the best investment you can make for your computer.
Darcy
I use Emsisoft, which works as both my anti-malware and antivirus program! Don’t see how you could have missed all the information on this great program, as it has won many awards, and works great. If you buy Emsisoft through C8 during one of their specials, you can usually get a nice discount. The cost is low–and the value is high!!
I have Windows 8 with the 8.1 upgrade, and use the free Windows Defender, however, I back that up with Emsisoft, which is not free, but the two seem to work well together with no conflicts
This does not surprise me at all – I remove malware off computers using Avast all the time. It is useless as far as I am concerned and has been for a long time. Unfortunately, when a company has been around a long time, people associate it with reliability. Also, programs like this pay software developers into bundling their product so it auto-downloads on millions of computers…. then they can says “Millions use our software”. Unsuspecting people see this claim and figure, if it is good enough for millions, it is good enough for me. And so it goes…..
Darcy, Cloudeight
Why hasn’t Avast notified it’s customers of the problem they are having? If they managed to write to C8, why couldn’t they email other people?
I don’t know. Did you register for their forum? They only notified forum members.
Darcy, you worked on my “old” computer getting it running like a charm. You asked me if I wanted to get rid of Avast and suggested that I install Emsisoft which you did for me. I am so happy that I took your advice as I know that I am now protected. Cost means nothing as long as a person doesn’t have to worry about viruses and malware.
I have Emsisoft on my desktop computer but not my notebook. Waiting for a deal that I can use on both computers. Emisisoft does a great job of keeping my computer free of virus’s and malware.