Avast by Numbers

[ceyfer]

I'm having fun reading this article ...

It has been a while since I have posted—we have been very busy moving into a new building, getting the new products out in beta form, and handling our first ever reseller meeting. But, thought it might be interesting to share some numbers:

Number of free users—between 80 and 93 million. We have 93 million registered users and about 80 million of them have updated their virus definitions recently. Both numbers are of course huge. We think this is the 1st or 2nd largest security user base in the world.

Number of pirated users—a while back we saw that we had 14 million pirated copies of Avast! Professional in use. We started notifying the users asking them to either pay or downgrade to the free product…..Hopefully none of you readers received such a message.

Amount of malware we block—1 billion a month. Last week I saw a press release from the largest traditional security company. The central point in the first paragraph was that they had blocked 245 million pieces of malware a month. 245 million seems big and readers may have been impressed. But it is tiny compared to 1 billion. Of course we have many, many more users than them….and maybe we even find more malware….

On any given day, 1 out of 15 of our users encounters at least one piece of malware.

How many unique pieces of malware do we block? There is no way of knowing. We have about 2.1 million detections built into our product. But a single detection may detect many, many pieces of malware.
We roll out nearly 3,000 new detections a day—most of them are done automatically.

We have about 90 staff—so 1 staff member for every 1 million users. Everything in the company is highly automated which allows us to support massive numbers of free users without much cost.

How large the Version 5 roll-out will be—we will be rolling out over 3 petabytes of data during the upgrade. To understand what a petabyte is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petabyte. According to that link, 50 petabytes is the entire written works of humankind from the beginning of recorded history and 1.5 petabytes is the size of the 10 billion photos stored on Facebook.

Avast new office building.

Keep up the Good work Team Avast !!!

Source : Avast Blog

[safeguy]

Man...the numbers are making me feel dizzy but honestly, Avast is a good company...if I didn't know Avira, I would recommend Avast anyday. If only all security companies can become more 'philanthropic'...

[ripper]

Thanks for the find.

[hellnoire]

Avast and Avira are my two choices if I want a free AV, and Avira's the only paid antivirus, other then NOD32, I'd ever run. Nothing against Avast, but it has a pain, once in a while, it's false positives.

[LunarWolf]

Avast and avira is the both AV I recommend to my friends. But I recommend Avira more cause I had an issue with Avast. I don't know whether they fix it already or not, evertime I run full scan with avast, it takes very long. Once after 3 hours+, total scan completed was ~50%. I was like WTH?!!!!!

But avast caught what AVG didn't. The first time I remove AVG and put in Avast, Avast detected 40+ trojans! That was impressive.

[swarup1987]

For free av i use AVG but it make so many false positives which is so bad & for paid ver. i use kaspersky

[LunarWolf]

Originally Posted by swarup1987

For free av i use AVG but it make so many false positives which is so bad & for paid ver. i use kaspersky

Just try Avast or Avira.

[212eta]

Avira Free (Real-Time) + A-Squared Free (On-Demand)
-OR-
Avast! Free (Real-Time) + A-Squared Free (On-Demand)

This is what I've used for about two (2) years in several PCs.

So far, so good!

[shan]

i never knew avast had that much of signatures
there free prduct is good compared to that of avg free.
anyway for the person above me i dont still understand y people use many to keep them super protected

[Polkadot]

Since no single AV can catch everything, it is usually recommended to have ONE real time scanner, and to use another program periodically as an on-demand scanner. It improves your odds on catching more malwares.