Antivirus and anti-spyware engine

Innovative scanning engine protects against viruses, spyware, and other malicious agents.

Heuristics engine

Proactively finds malware undetectable with normal definitions and virus signatures.

Real-time anti-rootkit protection

Prevents stealth malware (‘rootkits’) that, when loaded by the computer’s OS, are invisible to ordinary scanners.

Intelligent Scanner

Reduces the number of required file scans up to 80% through a white list of safe applications. Files identified as safe are not rescanned unless they change.

Multi-threaded scanning optimization

Allows the splitting of large files between cores, which accelerates the scanning process on new multi-core CPUs and makes avast! run even faster.

Scheduled scanning

Allows users to define the scan time and files to be scanned.

Code emulator

Uses dynamic translation (a method much faster than traditional emulation) for both generic unpacking and within the heuristics engine.

Smart virus definition updates

Incremental updating minimizes the size of regular update files.

Fast application of updates

New format for the virus definition file means faster updates and reduces demand on CPU/memory, for uninterrupted computing.

Potentially unwanted programs detection

Detects potentially unwanted programs, such as remote admin tools and commercial key loggers. Custom rules can be set for dealing with these types of programs.

SharePoint Server plug-in

Tightly integrates with SharePoint 2003/2007/2010 Servers via Microsoft's own AV interfaces.

Low resource usage

Stays light on system resources.