One million AVG downloads per week - twice over

Stephen Withers
Thursday, 17 January 2008 03:41

Business IT - Technology

More than one million copies of AVG Anti-Virus Free were downloaded in the week between Christmas and New Year, and again during the week beginning January 1, 2008.

Those numbers come from the CNet Download site, so they are more than just an unsubstantiated claim from developer Grisoft. An additional though unspecified record number of downloads were carried out directly from Grisoft's server, company officials said.

AVG Anti-Virus Free is the most popular program at CNet's download.com site.

Grisoft acquired Exploit Prevention Labs and its LinkScanner technology in December 2007. LinkScanner provides real-time warnings of 'dangerous' web pages before they are opened, helping to protect against drive-by downloads and other exploits. The technology is part of AVG 8.0 for Windows, currently in public beta, and will be included in a future free edition.

AVG 8.0 also includes an all-new anti-virus and anti-spyware scanning engine, rootkit detection, and some protection for MSN and ICQ messaging.