I’m not surprised that there’s vulnerable software on my computer – I have a lot of software and it’s a pain to update it all – but these last two items gave me a little bit of pause. AVAST ENDPOINT PROTECTION ADVANCED UPDATE What does Avast count as unprotected sensitive documents and how do they find them? Furthermore, how do they check the strength of my passwords?Īs it turns out, the sensitive documents scan is highly effective. It found tax records, employment documents, financial statements, and more – stuff I’ve stored on my computer without even remembering that I’ve put it there. In all, it only detected two false positives. Avast sorted these documents into categories such as taxes, payroll, employment, and travel (documents such as driver’s licenses and passports. It also gives you an easy button to the right of each entry that instantly shows you the location of each document that it finds. Reading between the lines of the marketing copy, Avast seems to be leveraging a technology known as Data Loss Prevention (DLP). DLP is a tool that’s normally used in the context of large companies that store customer data such as credit card and social security numbers. Using DLP, companies can scan word documents and conduct optical character recognition (OCR) on PDFs in order to detect strings of numbers that resemble these sensitive bits of data. The company can then know exactly where its sensitive data is and take steps to ensure that no one moves or deletes it. Simply knowing the location of my sensitive data is very useful and seeing DLP technology move from a corporate to a consumer context is interesting to say the least. There’s unfortunately not a lot that you can do with this information without locking yourself into a subscription, however. Once you do subscribe, you get the option to encrypt your information and store it in a secure digital locker. If any attacker attempts to move or delete these files, the program blocks access and notifies the user.Īvast’s weak password scan is frankly a bit of a letdown. I was expecting the service to tell me that I’d set one of my passwords to “123cat” or something equally simple by using some sort of futuristic hash-scanning algorithm. Instead, it just told me that I’m storing passwords in my browser (everyone does), that this method is potentially insecure (jury’s out on that), and that I should upgrade in order to use Avast Passwords, Avast’s password management service. AVAST ENDPOINT PROTECTION ADVANCED UPGRADE This may certainly be useful, but it’s not worth committing to a yearly subscription when you could just use one of the best password managers that are already available elsewhere. AVAST ENDPOINT PROTECTION ADVANCED PASSWORD (More on this later.) Does the Antivirus Engine Make the Grade?Īll of these extras are frankly a distraction from the core of the scan itself – the malware detector. Independent lab tests show that Avast has a highly-rated antivirus engine, demonstrating advanced features and flagging zero false positives. In addition, testing-under real-world conditions shows that Avast is efficient at detecting and mitigating the vectors – such as drive-by-downloads and code injection attacks – by which malware propagates. To summarize, Avast will detect most forms of advanced malware, and prevent most of them from even installing on your computer.
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