The leading firewall provider, Agnitum, announced today the availability of Outpost Antivirus Pro, offering an extended security arsenal to protect users against identity theft, malware infection, and websites that may be hosting malicious content. The company, in a new twist, is offering Outpost Antivirus Pro at a flat annual subscription fee rather than the license-plus-annual renewals model that has become the industry standard.

Mikhail Penkovsky, Global VP for Marketing and Sales at Agnitum says: "We took a close look at the anti-virus industry, which must be seen as a pretty mature business model now, after almost twenty years". "The reality is that what users are paying for primarily when they buy a commodity product like anti-virus is the ongoing security provided by the update service. So we thought 'why not price the software based on a pure subscription model?'


The core subscription service benefits of continually updated protection through:

- Thanks to the SmartScan technology that stores details of previous checks, repeat malware scans happen at lightning speed resulting in fast virus scans

- Outpost Antivirus Pro offers two-in-one protection, protecting against most types of malware in a single engine, backed by two independent, complementary antivirus labs working together to provide the most comprehensive and up-to-date threat coverage. Expertise in viruses, Trojans and other infective malware comes from Agnitum's VB100-certified partner Virus Buster, while the worm, spyware, adware and other snoop-ware intelligence is provided by Agnitum's in-house team.

There are additional 'bonus' functionalities also:

- Secure digital safe for the storage of confidential information
- Host protection to stop zero-day viruses
- URL blacklist to block malicious Internet sites
- Best-in-class self-protection to prevent unauthorized program termination

Like its siblings Outpost Firewall Pro and Outpost Security Suite Pro 2008, Outpost Antivirus Pro, has been specifically designed to take advantage of 64-bit Windows architecture. The software is lightweight on resources and runs on a 450 MHz or faster CPU (x-86/x-64/multi-core) with 256Mb RAM under 32- and 64-bit Microsoft Windows Vista, XP, Server 2003, and 2000 (SP3 and above).