Immunet releases free cloud-powered antivirus for Windows

They're not the first company to push out a cloud-based Windows antivirus product, but Immunet is hoping to make a splash with their newly-released beta of Immunet Protect.

"People are still getting viruses at alarming rates and traditional Anti-Virus software catches less than 50% of todays new threats," said Oliver Friedrichs (Immunet's Founder and CEO) in a press release. While I'm not sure I've seen numbers that support that statement I'm still always on the lookout for better free antivirus protection for my customers.

The key advantages of Immunet? They're pretty well the same as those touted by Panda: less bloat, no massive, frequent pattern updates to download, and an added splash of community collaboration to thwart malicious software. It's also light on system resources, barely impacting CPU usage and sitting just under 32Mb of memory during a system scan.

It's worth noting that only application installs are monitored in realtime by default. To activate application launch protection, open the program's main window and head to the settings screen.

As is also the case with Panda Cloud AV, Immunet doesn't want you to install it on Windows 7. It's only XP and Vista compatible for now. It does, however, install and perform just fine on Windows 7 if you run the installer in compatibility mode for Vista. It won't, however, be recognized by the Action Center's security monitoring.

To test the software, head on over to the Immunet website and download the beta. Don't mind the Facebook connect form - it's not required to get the download.

We've also added Immunet to our popular list of free antivirus software for Windows.

[via VentureBeat]

Tags: cloud-antivirus, freeware, immunet, malware, news, panda, security, trojan, virus