Free Vista Sunday, Threatfire provides additional virus protection
By Jonathan Schlaffer
You can never be too safe with a computer that’s connected to the Internet. In addition to your firewall, antivirus and antimalware protection, here is another layer of defense to be considered.
Most antivirus and antimalware systems rely on a set of database updates from the manufacturer of the product. These database updates allow the product to identify, remove/quarantine the latest threats. While they may have limited abilities to detect zero day threats, most lack the ability to identify a potential risk based on behavior.
That’s where Threatfire comes in. Instead of relying on set rules provided by a database, it examines and analyzes the behavior of programs on your computer. If it identifies suspicious behavior, it will stop the action of the program and wait until either you block or allow it. The program was designed specifically to deal with zero-day threats that may not yet have detection rules for your products of choice.
In addition to that active protection and to weed out the real nasty stuff, it comes with a rootkit scanner.
Threatfire is available in both a Free Edition and Professional (paid) Edition. Threatfire can be installed as a standalone product or you will have the option of installing it with the PCTools Firewall.
The paid editions of PCTools programs will provide one click access to the Firewall, AntiVirus and Spyware Doctor utilities. Howver, the standalone free versions of each can be used without problems or limitations (except the free versions lack phone support and a few advanced settings).
Threatfire will work in conjunction with your existing anti-virus software be it from PCTools or other so you do not need to uninstall your existing software.
It is available for Windows Vista, XP SP1/SP2, Windows 2K with SP4 rollup 1 and Windows 2003.
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