Check Point Enters Freemium AV Game

Check Point is looking to boost its consumer presence with a freemium version of its ZoneAlarm Free Antivirus + Firewall 2013.

It was made available yesterday as Check Point hopes to make a splash in a market dominated by the likes of Symantec, McAfee and Trend Micro. It will also hope to steal some customers from other freemium vendors, such as Avast, which is currently getting ready for an IPO.

Check Point has a substantial enterprise business. The company recently posted revenue growth of 11 percent, driven largely by its network security appliances and software blades. But in the consumer space it does not perform as strongly.

Check Point told TechWeekEurope its main differentiator in the latest ZoneAlarm product is the offer of a free firewall on top of AV. “Antivirus alone doesn’t provide nearly enough protection to counteract the current generation of blended threats.  That’s why ZoneAlarm wanted to offer better, free security protection for consumers, and combined both AV and the world’s leading free 2-way firewall,” said Bari Abdul, vice president and head of ZoneAlarm.

Little difference

As for the differences between the paid for product and the free version, AV signatures update automatically every 24 hours in the latter, whilst in the former they do so every hour.  Paid ZoneAlarm products also include additional features such as parental controls, support, virtual browsing, data encryption and PC tune-up.

But the engine running both models is the same. “In the AV engine, it’s virus signatures and heuristic detection.  The firewall functionality includes Check Point’s DefenseNet, a cloud system that automatically collects real-time threat data from ZoneAlarm firewalls globally,” Abdul added.

“Once a new threat has been verified, details about it are immediately shared with all users’ ZoneAlarm firewalls to nullify the threat.”

Check Point has issued a string of releases recently. One was ThreatCloud – a tool built into the company’s new GAiA operating system to let users share threat information with one another.

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