as it turns out, there are a truckload of users who are in two boats: For whatever reason, they un-installed all anti-virus. Maybe it slowed down their computer or they decided they didn’t need it. Either that or they had a virus that disabled anti-virus. The breakdown is probably 25 percent had a virus that disabled their anti-virus, and 75 percent who didn’t have any anti-virus before they installed our product thought they didn’t need it. So there seem to be really two schools of users, [those who have] nothing or everything. There are people who run Spyware Doctor, Threatfire, AVG, and then they will have like AVIRA with resident detection turned off, and then Hitman Pro and Online Armor, all on one machine. And you think, ‘Wow, how does your computer even boot, man?’” BK: Interesting. So, that means a fair number of your users have a virus on their system when they install your product? AH: It’s about 10 percent. At one point, a significant portion of our user base already had avirus when they signed up with us. BK: Doesn’t that suggest that the anti-virus industry is advertising protection it can’t provide? AH: The majority of anti-virus doesn’t work very well. The numbers they publish in the reviews are bull. It’s shameful. When we get past the “this software has turned my computer into a brick” syndrome, everyone I know has had a virus on their system even though they had a fully up-to-date anti-virus product. One of biggest problems of AV is that it’s still not solving the problem. If people made seat belts unreliable like this, executives would go to jail. BK: What anti-virus products does Immunet currently play nice with? [Huger provided me with a list of those anti-virus products that are and those that are (meaning Immunet doesn’t test them but users report success). Readers contemplating installing Immunet should read .] BK: So what’s next for Immunet? AH: The 2.0 version – which ships at the end of May – will be significantly different [screenshotbelow]. It has all of the functionality that a ‘pro’ main line AV product has. It still supports installing along side other AV products and it does have two new [anti-virus scanning] engines. One is called SPERO which is machine learning and cloud based and another called TETRA which is an ‘offline’ traditional PC side side engine which will only ship in the ‘Plus’ (commercial) version. We will also have both our Free version and a new commercial version which has offline protection and enhanced malware removal. Tags: , , This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 14th, 2010 at 12:20 am and is filed under , , . You can follow any comments to this entry through the feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.