As reported previously, Panda's Cloud AV is unusual in being one of the industry's few free IT security applications that does most of the legwork in the cloud. The company has said before that the main aim with the software is to anonymously collate intelligence on the latest security threats.
According to Pedro Bustamante, Panda's senior research advisor, the objective of this beta 1.9 is to test the interception of networking traffic in order to build cloud-based firewall functionalities in future versions.
In beta 1.9, he says, the networking interception is applied to HTTP and POP3 traffic, with a process monitor that keeps track of HTTP web traffic requests on a per-process basis. No traditional firewall functionality is provided in the beta, just interception.
In order to promote thorough testing of beta 1.9, Bustamante adds that Panda is giving away ten $100 Amazon gift certificates "to the most active beta testers who report bugs in the Panda Cloud Antivirus Beta Support Forum."
"The winners of the gift certificates will be selected at the close of the promotion by the support forum moderators amongst the users with the most amount of new – i.e. unknown at the time of posting – bug reports", he notes.
As well as a process monitor, beta 1.9 of Panda's Cloud AV software is billed as having the ability block a process by sending it to a recycle bin, as well as the ability to disable/enable BackgroundScan after signature cache synchronisation has taken place.
The software is also billed as featuring a new toolbar that operates without ID Protect & Shopping, and with a toolbar cleaner option.