Your Home Computer Guide

In a recent article I wrote about the importance of protecting your computer from viruses, trojans and other forms of malware. Once a computer gets infected like attracts like and you can quickly find our PC so badly infected that getting back to a clean state will either be a time consuming or costly experience.

When it comes to our computer security there is no silver bullet. There’s not a single product on the market that can detect or clean 100% of the known malware.

Most antivirus programs use a database of signatures to identify malware. ThreatFire, on the other hand, looks at the behavior of the programs on your PC and effectively identifies the malicious ones and stops them in their tracks. With the number of new threats increasing daily using a behavior based anti-malware is essential to catch the ones your antivirus program doesn’t have definitions for yet.

There are a lot of things I really like about ThreatFire. It literally takes about one minute to install, the default settings are more than adequate to stop the bad guys, updates are installed automatically, and it has a very small footprint so you won’t even know it’s there until you need it.

Although ThreatFire does an excellent job of stopping malware from installing on your PC it shouldn’t be used to clean up an infected computer, nor should it be your only line of defense. Using a firewall and having a definition based antivirus program running will do well to round out your PC security. See my Computer Security article for suggestions.

WARNING: Since publishing this article I’ve installed ThreatFire on 4 PCs with Windows XP Home edition and in every case it caused the PC to lock up continuously. All of the PCs had to be restarted several times and the problem was only resolved by uninstalling ThreatFire. I tested ThreatFire on Windows XP Pro and Windows Vista and didn’t run into any problems. I reported the problem to the ThreatFire developers but haven’t gotten a response from them.

I won’t be loading ThreatFire on any more computers until I’m satisfied the issue has been fixed and I can only suggest that you do the same.

I’m currently evaluating the new version of AVG and will give it a review soon. If you’re currently using AVG and have been told you need to upgrade, getting to the free version can be a little tricky. Use this link to save some time & confusion: Download AVG Antivirus.

Happy Computing!

-Bert

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 18th, 2008 at 3:54 pm and is filed under Review, Security, Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.