Advice Request avast! NG - What is it? (Avast 2015)

[Tony Cole]

Hi everyone,

Does anyone here know how avast! NG works - I'm currently using avast! premier 2015?

Tony

 

[Venustus]

Hi everyone,

Does anyone here know how avast! NG works - I'm currently using avast! premier 2015?

Tony

It takes a snapshot of your drive thereby enhancing "Deepscreen"

Some information about new avast! NG component: our classic sandbox technology (used for DeepScreen, Sandbox and SafeZone components) restricts a sandboxed application to modify your system. As Windows OS is quite rich for various APIs and frameworks, we need to monitor more and more OS functions invoked from the unknown applications. This works perfect for Sandbox/SafeZone, but it's not enough for DeepScreen analysis. When a malware is analyzed in DeepScreen, we'd like to allow it to behave freely without any restrictions and monitor only its activities. Unfortunately, we might end up very soon if it tries e.g. to load a kernel-mode driver (you can't monitor kernel-mode, and if it gets there, it can control your entire OS, hide itself, connect to internet, ...), or use some undocumented system calls on 64-bit OSes (we use own hypervisor driver to fully protect 64-bit OSes, but this doesn't work on older PCs or with disabled VT-X/AMD-V feature in BIOS).

Avast! NG helps us to analyze malware real-time totally without any restrictions - it can load a kernel driver, it can delete any Windows files, format your volume, everything it wishes. The malware is executed on your OS using VirtualBox engine and the entire OS with malware is monitored. NG was heavily tested for a few months by our user base and we have fixed various HW/SW conflicts and tuned performance. After avast installation, it takes a couple of minutes to prepare NG (this is executed in the background with normal priority in this Beta, it'll be on idle priority in final release).

Avast! NG system requirements:
- physical machine
- Vista+ (32-bit OS with 1.5GB+ RAM, 64-bit with 2.5Gb+ RAM), XP will be supported in final release
- VT-X/AMD-V must be enabled in BIOS for all Win8+ 32-bit OS and for all 64-bit OSes (NG will work correctly on other OSes without VT-X/AMD-V)
- 10% free space on system disk, not less than 2GB (this won't be required in final release)
- in RTM, NG will be disabled on slower computers
If NG components is missing in custom installation, you can check "setup.log" why NG can't be installed on your computer.

More here

 

[Tony Cole]

Thank you venustus for the explanation. It would seem to be a very powerful idea

 

[Venustus]

Thank you venustus for the explanation. It would seem to be a very powerful idea

Yes it is innovative!
All components will be "full house" this evening according to Avast personell.

You're welcome!

 

[Tony Cole]

Does that mean another update, or just updates their end?

 

[Venustus]

Probably an update will be forthcoming!

 

[dragonmew]

so how do we know if we have avast NG installed i nour avast free antivirus cos i cant see it anywhere

 

[Secondmineboy]

Take a look in taskmanager, there should be some NG processes: http://prntscr.com/4yo00t

 

[dragonmew]

nope all i have is avastui.exe and im on avast 2015