Your options include ten minutes, one hour, until restart, and indefinitely. Avast will even give you time intervals to select from if you want your shields to toggle back on automatically.

You can disable them by merely toggling each green switch. If you click on Core Shields, you’ll see your four main shields in action. However, the Core Shields are what we’ll be looking at in this guide. If you have the full Avast Antivirus software, you’ll see a few extra features, such as a Ransomware Shield and a firewall. Once you have Protection open, you’ll see the areas your Avast software protects. It should be running in your system tray. To do this, you first need to open the Avast program. For example, if Avast is preventing you from accessing a specific website, you can simply turn off the Web Shield temporarily until you’re ready to have protection again. The nice thing about this part of Avast Antivirus is that you can disable each shield individually if you only want to turn certain parts of the program off. As you might expect, each of these “shields” protects and monitors a different aspect of your activity. Avast Antivirus – both the free and the paid version – works by protecting specific elements of your device using “ shields.” Avast has four different core shields: the Web Shield, Mail Shield, Behavior Shield, and File Shield.