Scope of Avast Hardened Mode

[AtlBo]

Got Avast on a couple of PCs and I have a question about hardened mode. Anyone know what exactly changes with hardened mode on aggressive compared to moderate or off? Also, will alerts generated by hardened mode say hardened mode on the alert? Seem to remember seeing that once at some point a while back. I also have CyberCapture enabled btw.

I have this one PC rigged to the gills with Avast. Only thing not maxed is "Scan files with default extensions". I had backed off of "Scan all files" after reading some of you guys' comments in various threads.

After going through the settings, I have realized I have basically turned on everything else at the highest settings. It's kind of an old system w/ 4GB and a core2quad processor, so I wouldn't mind backing off on some things. Comodo Firewall is also on the PC (@cruelsister but HIPs on Safe), so I don't know how much of it I need. On the main PC, I've grown accostomed to using NVT ERP as a fallback for Comodo (CFW still only a moderate<->high trust rating for me so far reliability-wise), but it's not installed on the avast PCs. Because of this, I tend to go a little bit hard with protection when supplementing CFW.

 

[In2an3_PpG]

Found this Hardened Mode Avast thread from 2013 explaining hardened mode.

@RejZoR explained the 2 modes quite well.

Hardened Mode: Moderate
Under normal conditions, if avast! decides that some file is too suspicious by various characteristics, it then throws it into the DeepScren for further scanning. But if Moderate Hardened Mode is enabled, avast! automatically blocks files that are detected as suspicious by preliminary analysis.
In most cases DeepScreen checks the file and if it doesn't find obvious malicious problems with it, those files are started automatically after analysis. But Hardened Mode (Moderate) blocks it right there.

Hardened Mode: Aggressive
This mode behaves a bit differently. It actually relies on analysis on a very small scale and mostly relies on a huge whitelist database located in avast! Cloud. If file is located within the cloud and flagged as safe, it will allow to run it. If it's not found or marked as bad, it will block it. So, at least based on my experience, Aggressive Mode is actually much more secure and also a lot less intrusive. Only time that it will cause problems is with some very rare old software or very very new software that isn't used by thousands of users. Usually some very specialized programs used by only few users.
Moderate mode often feels a bit too paranoid (despite its name) because it often blocks safe programs just because they exhibit local suspicious file characteristics that are basically ignored by the Aggressive mode.

Hope this helps you out a bit.

 

[AtlBo]

Thanks. I was just reading some of @RejZoR's posts on the Avast site. I had his settings blog in my tabs for about 3 months lol.