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So one less choice now, and who knows whether it is for better or worse coming out of the merger.

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/avast- ... 2016-07-07

I'm a little surprised there's that much money in anti-virus. One's a poor sample size, but I've never paid for AV in my life (nor have I pirated it).

bthylafh wrote:

I'm a little surprised there's that much money in anti-virus. One's a poor sample size, but I've never paid for AV in my life (nor have I pirated it).

There's money on the corporate side, and I've seen more than one email from people with a footer indicating their ISP or company was running Avast on their mailservers. Though I would've expected that if anybody went shopping it'd be Symantec, since they're already the big dog in that market and every business loves a monopoly consolidation.

Flying Fox wrote:

Avast buying AVG for 1.3billion

bthylafh wrote:

I'm a little surprised there's that much money in anti-virus.

I cringed reading the title. It's a very questionable move, because the market for traditional PC security products is shaky at best. Not only do all Windows PCs now have a solution included with the OS, but the PC market is shrinking overall.

Flying Fox wrote:

So one less choice now, and who knows whether it is for better or worse coming out of the merger.

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/avast- ... 2016-07-07

Almost certainly for the worse, for customers and employees of both firms. The only winners are the execs and the people who were holding AVG stock.

One less competitor will lower the bar... makes me glad I am not reliant on Windows AV solutions any more. (Linux at home, OSX and Linux at work.)

UberGerbil wrote:

Though I would've expected that if anybody went shopping it'd be Symantec, since they're already the big dog in that market and every business loves a monopoly consolidation.

Apparently they already did the shopping.

The article wrote:

The deal comes less than a month after antivirus pioneer Symantec Corp. agreed to pay $4.65 billion for cyberdefense vendor Blue Coat Systems Inc.

A much bigger buy than AVG, with more on the corporate side for sure.

On their PC AV software fronts, AVG has been getting bloated, Avast is quite intrusive/heavy; I do not want to imagine what the demon lovechild of this will look like.

AVG's been bloated since ~2007 or so, not long after they brought out their full-fat "internet security" product and plonked a lot of it into their antivirus.

For what it's worth, both tech companies I've worked for used paid-for AVG for a long time before switching to another paid-for business solution after a string of high-profile fails.

Signature based AV by definition cannot detect a threat that isn't included in the signature database, so by that measure the industry as a whole is more about damage control than prevention.

AVG is more than AV, they have purchased some other semi unrelated companies. We use LPI to monitor our clients and they were snatched up a few years ago IIRC.

Redocbew wrote:

Signature based AV by definition cannot detect a threat that isn't included in the signature database, so by that measure the industry as a whole is more about damage control than prevention.

I'd be astonished to learn that there are any AV products in the past 20 years that don't use heuristics to catch things they don't have definitions for.

That's what I thought at first also. Maybe things have changed within the past couple of years since I was interested in the subject, but at the time the picture I got from it all was not a good one.

You seem to be implying that there are AV programs without heuristics out there. If so, name and shame them.