America Online has presented earlier this week a new service as integer part of its new free-of-charge business philosophy. Active Virus Shield is a security solution debuted by AOL as a free offer conjugating traditional antivirus programs powered by Kaspersky Labs. "Active Virus Shield seamlessly integrates with the Microsoft Windows family of operating systems and is compatible with other PC protection programs (firewalls, anti-spyware, etc.). Like other anti-virus programs, using Active Virus Shield may require that you uninstall other anti-virus programs to avoid product incompatibilities," reads a message posted by AOL.

Being based on Kaspersky Lab's award winning Personal Anti-Virus and created to integrate with the versions of the Windows platform, Active Virus Shield was fine tuned to deliver a continuously threat monitoring system that is virtually invisible when it comes to machine resources allocations, while combining traditional signature-based detection with in-depth scanning of executables. Added to the constant monitoring function, AOL's security solution provides automatic hourly updates, keeping track with the latest threats and threat-responses.

"Active Virus Shield supports most e-mail clients (e.g POP3, IMAP or NNTP) to scan incoming email and SMTP protocol to scan outgoing mail. For popular mail programs, like Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Outlook Express, plug-ins and routines for treatment of viruses in email databases are also available,"

"In today's environment of organized cybercrime and ever-changing online threats, it's more important than ever for consumers to have comprehensive virus and spyware protection that's continuously updated and easy-to-use," said Steve Orenberg, President, Kaspersky Labs.