AVG Technologies has announced that its family of free and paid internet security products, AVG 9.0, would be generally available to the market in October 2009.

Boosted by significant enhancements in speed and levels of protection, AVG 9.0 is also easier to use and improves end user experience.

"AVG 9.0 will provide home computer users with a more powerful and more streamlined solution that adds protection without impacting user experience, taking us back to our core strength of low impact, high performance security," said J.R. Smith, CEO, AVG Technologies. "We’ve always believed that everyone has the right to a safe online experience. With AVG 9.0, we are providing first-class assistance to our users in their development of tools and measures for their safety from all of the threats posed by cybercriminals and identity thieves, whether they’re working, playing, banking or shopping on the web."

AVG 9.0’s combined anti-virus/anti-spyware scanner employs new technology that marks files as safe or potentially unsafe during the initial scan, and skips the safe files in future scans unless the file structure changes. As a result, users experience dramatically reduced scan times – by up to 50 percent depending on system configuration – as well as improvements of 10 to 15 percent for boot times and memory usage.

AVG 9.0 also combines all modern technologies to optimize real time protection. Starting with the foundation of signature-based protection to deal with known threats, AVG 9.0 builds on top of that behavioral, in-the-cloud, and white listing technologies to address the tens of thousands of new threats daily.

New in AVG 9.0 is the integration between the Resident Shield, firewall, and identity protection modules. This enables the modules to share malware information with each other, increasing AVG’s ability to detect and remove most malicious types of malware, rootkits, and ID Theft threats, for which signatures have not yet been issued. The firewall enhancements include a complete redesign to reduce intrusive firewall ASK dialogues by 50 percent. This also makes the firewall application significantly quieter and less intrusive, as its new trusted database of applications and application certificates allows the application, without user intervention, to see whether it is safe to allow communication of the application or if it should be blocked.

Additionally, because the new firewall works behind the scenes with the behavioral detection technology in the AVG Identity Protection module, it can deliver one of the most accurate detection levels of new and unknown threats.

AVG 9.0 delivers improved anti-phishing detection through enhancements to its LinkScanner offering, which can now more quickly and accurately determine whether or not a web page is hosting a phishing attack. This is accomplished by allowing the software to apply more than 100 different potential threat indicators to a page. If the result is inconclusive, LinkScanner then makes a call to the cloud to check a multitude of phishing feeds plugged into the AVG research network to make a final determination regarding threat potential.

AVG 9.0 delivers a solution that is laser focused on user concerns and protection, and is marked by a new look and feel designed to significantly improve user experience and ease of use. Responding to customer feedback, the AVG installation process has been shortened by 50 percent and the user protection process has been simplified. Finally, it is also significantly easier for users to detect and remove any third-party security product that could cause conflicts with AVG 9.0 and interfere with the user’s level of protection.

The complete AVG 9.0 paid family of consumer products is available now. Pricing for a one-year, one-seat license for AVG Anti-Virus 9.0 starts at Rs. 1,001 and a two-year, one-seat license for AVG Anti-Virus 9.0 starts at Rs. 1,488. AVG Free 9.0 will be available mid-October.