Dozens of security-related tools in one free suite
Antivirus protection for your PC is imperative, regardless of your budget. If you can’t afford to pay for it, just select a free antivirus tool. Avira Free Security goes beyond just antivirus, offering VPN, password management, ad blocking, and more. It’s not a typical security suite, though. You won’t find firewall protection, backup, spam filtering, or other common suite components. And many of its features are fully or partially reserved for paying customers. If you’re after a slimmed-down free suite, Avast One Essential is a better choice. For free protection focused on core antivirus features, try AVG AntiVirus Free. These two are our Editors’ Choice winners for free antivirus apps.Avira’s Family History
Avira is owned by Gen Digital. Gen also owns Avast, AVG, LifeLock, Norton, and a host of other companies. This giant collection didn’t happen all at once. In 2016, Avast acquired AVG. Before long, the two product lines were using the same antivirus engine. Around the same time, Norton acquired LifeLock.
In 2020, Norton acquired Avira. Shortly thereafter, Avira acquired BullGuard, but within a couple of years, Norton shut down the BullGuard brand and migrated its customers to Norton AntiVirus. Rounding out the collection, Norton acquired Avast/AVG in 2021 and created Gen as the parent company for all.
Between them, the Gen antivirus properties have four distinct antivirus engines (yes, four). Avast and AVG use the same engine, but BullGuard’s technology remains. My Gen contacts inform me that starting this fall they’re working on creating one unified antivirus engine using the best parts of each technology.Getting Started With Avira Free Security
Avira’s installer is seriously self-sufficient. Once you begin installation, it advises you to take a break for the four or five minutes needed to complete the process. You get the choice to continue with a free installation or purchase a license that upgrades you to Avira Prime. After installation, Avira offers to run a Smart Scan. I skipped that initial scan for testing purposes.
Avira’s main Status screen displays oversized icons for Security, Privacy, and Performance. A simple menu down the left lets you dig into these three feature areas or return to the Status home page. Finally, you can click a button to run the all-in-one Smart Scan. If you don’t run a Smart Scan immediately after the quick, simple installation, the antivirus will keep nagging you until you do.
Smart Scan checks for active malware, of course, but it does a lot more. It analyzes your settings to find privacy problems, looks for ways to improve performance, identifies apps that need updating, and checks the network for possible security problems. More about Smart Scan later.Excellent Lab Test Results
To supplement my hands-on testing of antivirus apps, I turn to reports issued regularly by four independent labs worldwide. The simple fact that a given antivirus appears in a report means that the lab’s experts thought it significant enough to merit the effort of testing and reporting on it. The more lab results, the better, and, of course, high scores are important. Three of the four labs consider Avira important enough to test, and all three gave it perfect or near-perfect marks.
Researchers at AV-Test Institute evaluate each antivirus on three distinct criteria. Naturally, they measure its ability to protect against malware. They also score apps on how well they avoid erroneously flagging legitimate processes as malicious, an index they call usability. And they ensure the antivirus does all this without dragging down performance. An antivirus can earn up to six points for each of the three criteria. In this lab’s latest report, Avira, along with half the apps tested, earned sixes in all three categories, a perfect 18 points.
Of the many reports coming out of AV-Comparatives, I follow three. This lab doesn’t use numbers. Rather, an antivirus that passes the test earns Standard certification. Those that go beyond the basics can earn Advanced or Advanced+ certification. In this lab’s latest tests, Avast, AVG, Bitdefender, and ESET managed three Advanced+ ratings. Like McAfee, Avira earned Advanced+ in two tests and Advanced in one, a fine showing.
With SE Labs, certification comes in five levels: AAA, AA, A, B, and C. In the past, Avira routinely took AAA certification in this test, but it hasn’t appeared in this lab’s reports for the last couple of years.
As you can see, most of the labs offer a range of scores to reflect a range of capabilities. Tests by London-based MRG-Effitas are scored differently. In this lab’s reports, an antivirus either exhibits near-perfect protection or fails utterly. I follow one test focusing on banking Trojans and another testing all-around malware defense. Most products in the latest reports passed, including Avira, Bitdefender, and ESET NOD32 Antivirus.
Since all the labs use different scoring systems, I’ve devised an algorithm that maps the scores onto a 10-point scale and generates an aggregate score. As noted, I also consider inclusion by more labs to be better. At present, only Avast, Microsoft, and Norton span all four labs, scoring 9.8, 9.5, and 9.5, respectively.
Among those tested by three labs, Bitdefender stands out with a perfect 10 points. ESET comes close with 9.9 points, followed by McAfee with 9.8 and Avira with 9.7.Mixed Malware Protection Scores
Lab results notwithstanding, I always perform my own hands-on tests. I start by opening a folder of malware samples that I’ve curated and analyzed myself. Avira immediately started quarantining those that it recognized. It eliminated 73% of the samples on sight, which is rather low. UltraAV and ZoneAlarm wiped out 96% of the samples at this stage. On the plus side, Avira eliminated every ransomware sample on sight. After recording Avira’s initial reaction, I launched the samples that made it past this initial culling.
In the end, Avira detected 97% of the samples and scored 9.3 out of 10 possible points, the same score it reached when last reviewed. Looking just at antivirus tools tested with the current sample set, that score puts Avira right in the middle of the pack, with as many higher scores as lower. Avast, AVG, and UltraAV top the list, each with 9.9 points. Malwarebytes and Norton are close behind with 9.8.
For many years, Avira’s full scan happened in a separate window titled Luke Filewalker. I don’t know whether George Lucas found out about it or not, but the slightly cheesy Luke Filewalker window vanished a couple of years ago, replaced by fully integrated scan reporting. A full scan of a clean test system took 96 minutes, about the same as when I last tested Avira and somewhat faster than the current average of 115 minutes. A repeat scan took about the same amount of time.
Avira offers several browser extensions for Chrome, Edge, Firefox, and Opera. These include a password manager, a shopping helper, and the security-centric Browser Safety extension. Browser Safety aims to head off any possibility of malware infection by steering your browser away from malware-hosting URLs. Do be sure to enable Browser Safety. Note that the Web Protection feature, whose toggle you see on the main window, is completely different and not included in this free suite.
To test this feature, I start with a feed of malware-hosting URLs recently discovered by researchers at the British lab MRG-Effitas. I launch each URL, discarding any that are already defunct, and note whether the antivirus blocked all access to the URL, eliminated the malware download, or did nothing.
I give equal credit for blocking the URL and for eliminating the download. Avira aced this test, achieving 100% protection, vastly better than the 70% it managed when last tested. It steered the browser away from almost every verified malware-hosting page, 98% of them. Regular antivirus protection caught the remaining 2%.
In their respective tests, Bitdefender, Guardio, Sophos, and Trend Micro also reached 100% protection. NordVPN Plus and Aura managed 99%.Excellent Phishing Protection
Coding a Trojan horse or other malicious program that can steal passwords while evading antivirus utilities is a tough slog. Fooling unsuspecting consumers into foolishly handing over their login credentials is much easier. Phishing fraudsters simply create a website that’s visually identical to, say, PayPal. Sometimes, they manage a URL that’s close to the real thing, like paypal.loginuser.com. When an unwitting web surfer logs in, the fraudsters capture the username and password, and that unfortunate netizen is hosed. Yes, you can learn to spot fraudulent sites, but the best antivirus apps handle phishing protection even when you’re tired or muzzy.
Avira’s web protection extends to detecting and averting these phishing attacks as well. To test it, I first scraped hundreds of reported phishing URLs from websites that track such things, including both verified frauds and reported pages that were too new to be blacklisted.
