Avira GmbH

Geschichte

Avira Operations GmbH & Co. KG is a German multinational security software company that provides antivirus software, Internet Security, Privacy, Identity and Performance tools for computers, smartphones, servers and networks, delivered as both software and cloud-based services.Avira's headquarters are located near Lake Constance, in Tettnang, Germany. The company has additional offices in the USA, China, Romania and the Netherlands.With an estimated 9.6% of global market share according to OPSWAT, and over 100 million customers, Avira was considered the sixth-largest antivirus vendor in 2012.The company supports the Auerbach Stiftung, a foundation created by the company's founder, Tjark Auerbach. It promotes charitable and social projects, the arts, culture and science.TechnologyVirus DefinitionAvira periodically "cleans out" its virus definition files, replacing specific signatures with generic ones for a general increase in performance and scanning speed. A 15 MB database clean-out was made on 27 October 2008, causing problems to the users of the Free edition because of its large size and Avira's slow Free edition servers. Avira responded by reducing the size of the individual update files, delivering less data in each update. Nowadays there are 32 smaller definition files that are updated regularly in order to avoid peaks in the download of the updates.Advance Heuristic (AHeAD)Avira products contain heuristics that can proactively uncover unknown malware, i.e. before a special virus signature to combat the damaging element has been created and before a virus guard update has been sent.