AVG Identity Protection is an anti-malware product that will protect you from all kinds of malware like Spyware, Bots, Identity Theft using behavioral technologies. It also provides zero day protection for new viruses. Identity Protection verifies the behavior of applications and if there is suspicious action detected (this means e.g. when file copies itself to system folder, writes data into another files and creates registry entries, gathers important data and saves them to a specific file or uploads them to the Internet...), you will get notified. Identity Protection can detect malware without any database updates and therefore may provide better protection than anti-virus applications in specific cases (when blocking newly spreading malware).

On the other hand, IDP will not be able to detect infected file that is only present in your computer and does not perform any actions (e.g. is only stored and not running at all). Such file must be detected and healed by Anti-Virus scan.

AntiVirus product will protect you from known viruses using signature mechanism or basic heuristic analysis. Most of them are scan based and will scan your computer for any known threats coming to your computer.

We strongly recommend you have the both products installed, in order to have complete protection for your PC.

In some cases, AVG Identity Protection component may report a legitimate process as being suspicious or dangerous. Since AVG Identity Protection identifies threats based application behavior, this usually occurs when the applicaiton tries to monitor key presses, installs other programs or when a new driver is installed on the computer. The following situations may occur:

1. Harmless application is marked as infected or as a threat

To allow that application follow these steps:

• Open AVG
• Click Tools in the top menu, and then select Advanced Settings
• In the left tree under Identity Protection click Allowed List
• Click Add on the right
• Browse to folder containing the application, select the application and then click Add

Note: You can use the same steps to remove incorrectly allowed application - use Remove in the last step.

2. Harmless application was quarantined by Identity Protection component

To restore the application from quarantine: 

• Open AVG
• Click History in the top menu, and then select Virus Vault
• Find the application that was incorrectly quarantined (files quarantined by Identity Protection will have icons in the severity column)
• Select the file, and then click Restore

3. An Identity Protection alert is shown for a harmless application

If you receive an alert stating a process is detected as threat by Identity Protection you can allow it by clicking Allow in that alert. This will prevent blocking of the process.