The Russian antivirus software firm, Kaspersky Lab has announced that it is launching a free version of its renowned antivirus software. Kaspersky Free is immediately available in some parts of the world and a detailed schedule is posted in
a blog written by Eugene Kaspersky, the founder of the company.
Source: eugene.kaspersky.com
Eugene wrote,
“We’ve been working on this release for a good year-and-a-half, with pilot versions in a few regions, research, analysis, tweaks and the rest of it, and out of all which we deduced the following:
- The free antivirus won’t be competing with our paid-for versions. In our paid-for versions there are many extra features, like: Parental Control, Online Payment Protection, and Secure Connection (VPN), which easily justify the ~$50 for premium protection.
- There are a lot of users who don’t have the ~$50 to spend on premium protection; therefore, they install traditional freebies (which have more holes than Swiss cheese for malware to slip through) or they even rely on Windows Defender (ye gods!).
- An increase in the number of installations of Kaspersky Free will positively affect the quality of protection of all users, since the big-data-bases will have more numbers to work with to better hone the machine learning.
And based on those three deductions we realized we had to do one thing, and fast: roll out a KL freebie all over the planet!”
However, Kaspersky says that the Free version is not a replacement to the paid Kaspersky antivirus but it is a lighter version with all the esssential features, such as – file, email and web antivirus; automatic updates, self-defense; quarantine; and so on.
Source: eugene.kaspersky.com
All these features and offerings sound good, however, being a Russian enterprise, Kaspersky has been under suspicion of having ties with Russian intelligence and Government infulence. This is why the company has lost a big chunk of revenue in the U.S in recent years. Even, there is a bill in Congress that would explicitly prohibit the Department of Defense from using Kaspersky products.
Now, this is to see how the world takes
Kaspersky Free and how the antivirus performs in protecting the consumers from a world full of vulnerabilities.