We are happy to announce that we just released Panda Cloud Antivirus version 1.3. This new version of Panda Cloud Antivirus has been made possible thanks to our large community of users and specially to our Support Forum Trusted Mods who have helped a lot of users and gathered enough feedback to incorporate major improvements as well as many different bug fixes. All new features have been included in both the Free and Pro Edition.

If you have Panda Cloud Antivirus 1.1.0, 1.1.1 or 1.1.2, you will get the upgrade automatically and transparently over the course of the next few days (see below for details). If you don’t have Panda Cloud Antivirus installed yet you can download it from www.cloudantivirus.com.

The main new features and fixes included in Panda Cloud Antivirus 1.3 are the following:

  • Malicious Web & URL Filtering. This feature blocks websites that push malware, exploits and drive-by downloads. It is available both in Free and in Pro Editions and is installed by the toolbar. Unlike similar solutions, this web filtering works at a low level so it works under all browsers: Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, etc. For those of you that didn’t install the toolbar but would like to install the Web & URL Filtering, you can download it from here and install it manually.

  • Unified Recycle Bin and Quarantine. Previously the Recycle Bin handled suspicious detections and the Quarantine handled deleted malware detections. This has been unified into a new Recycle Bin for ease of management. This is included in both Free and Pro Editions.

  • Automatic and transparent upgrades to new product versions, previously only available in the Pro Edition, this is now available in the Free Edition as well. All users of Free Editions versions 1.1.0, 1.1.1 and 1.1.2 will automatically and transparently upgrade to the new 1.3. See notes below for the upgrade schedule.

  • No more nagging advertising. After listening to many of you we have decided to turn off the nagging advertising popups prompting to upgrade to Pro Edition. If you want to support Panda Cloud Antivirus and wish to get the Pro Edition, you can do so from here, but we won’t bug you anymore from the popups.

  • Hot updating of behavioural blocking rules. In order to increase protection on the fly against new vulnerabilities and attacks and to fix false positives, hot updating of behavioural blocking rules allows faster response time in both the Free and Pro Editions.

  • Immediate notifications of virus detections. Previously if Panda Cloud Antivirus encountered multiple viruses, it would delay its traybar notification and show them grouped. This behaviour has been changed so that the notifications are shown immediately.

  • Suspicious detection counter. Under the statistics window there’s some new counters for the different types of heuristics and behavioural detections.

  • New versioning format. Unified versioning format in GUI and other parts of the program.

  • Many bugfixes as reported by users in our support forum:
    – Fixed issue with Windows 7 Start menu slow-down.
    – Fixed Panda traybar icon disappearing.
    – Fixed “you are not connected to the Internet” message when there is connection.
    – Fixed issue when Free Edition users can activate behavioural analysis.
    – Fixed slow-down and conflicts while playing Allods Online and AION.
    – Fixed cloud-response time configuration which defaults to 30 seconds.
    – Fixed constant accesses to the floppy disk drive.
    – Fixed BSOD issue after install.
    – Fixed bug while exporting an empty report to TXT/CSV.
    – Fixed Conficker detection.
    – Fixed BSOD while compressing malicious PDFs.
    – Fixed translation errors.

–

In case you still have some questions about Panda Cloud Antivirus 1.3, here are some frequently asked questions. If you don’t find an answer to your question please contact us at the support forum.

When will my Panda Cloud Antivirus upgrade itself?
The automatic and transparent upgrade to the new Panda Cloud Antivirus version 1.3 will happen progressively over the next week or two. Initially users of version 1.1.0 will be upgraded automatically and some days later users of 1.1.2. Finally users of version 1.1.1 will be upgraded automatically.

What if I don’t want to wait for the automatic upgrade?
Simply go to www.cloudantivirus.com, download the new 1.3 version and install it on top of you current one. As you run the installer, it will prompt you to unsintall your current version and, after a reboot, will install the new one. If you have any problems please contact us at the tech support forum.

My Panda Cloud Antivirus has been upgraded but I cannot see the Web & URL Filtering Toolbar
The Web & URL Filtering component is installed by the toolbar. If you don’t already have the toolbar installed (or you uninstalled it) then the automatic upgrade will not install the new toolbar (the automatic ugprade keeps the same config as you currently have). If that is the case, you can manually download and install the new Web & URL Filtering Toolbar from here.

I know I’ve installed the Web & URL Filtering Toolbar but want to “see” it in action
There is nothing visible in the toolbar like a button to “see” the Web & URL Filter. Simply make sure there is a process running on your computer called panda2_0dn.exe and you’re good to go. If you don’t see the panda2_0dn.exe process running, install the Panda Security Toolbar manually from here. You can test that the filter is working by trying to visit http://www.cloudantivirus.com/testurlfilter

How do I disable the Web & URL Filtering?
– Go to Control Panel, Add/Remove Programs and uninstall “Panda Security Toolbar URL Filtering”.
– If you only want to disable the filtering for a short time, simply kill the “panda2_0dn.exe” process.
– For those of you wanting to visit malicious pages and/or to manage potential false positives, very soon we will add an exclusion button in the blocked pages so that you can bypass the Web & URL filter.

I have and older Panda Cloud Antivirus, version 1.0.x. What should I do?
You can do one of two things:
– Wait for an automatic upgrade. We are developing an automatic upgrade for users of 1.0. It should be released in a few weeks.
– Manually upgrade to the new version 1.3. Simply download the new version from www.cloudantivirus.com and run it. It will prompt you to uninstall the previous version and, after a reboot, install the new one. If you have any problems please contact us at the tech support forum.

So what’s the difference between Free and Pro now?
You can see the feature-to-feature comparison in the following table. As you can see we have added many new things to the Free Edition to make Panda Cloud Antivirus the best free antivirus available anywhere!