We recently wrote about the free firewall being offered by PC Tools, and they have yet another free security application for those of you who want all the protection you can get. It’s called ThreatFire, and it runs alongside your existing antivirus software. With it your computer will be more able to detect malware before it has a chance to harm your computer.
PC Magazine put ThreatFire through its paces to see how it stacked up, and to find out how well it could detect the potentially dangerous malware, spyware, rootkits, keyloggers, and more. Here are their results:
After the required reboot at the end of installation, I got out my arsenal of malware samples, including adware, spyware, rootkits, Trojans, and rogue antispyware products … I wasn’t too surprised when [ThreatFire] let all but one of the rogue antispyware samples install and run …
When I compiled all of the malware-blocking test results, [ThreatFire] came out with 8.6 out of 10 possible points. If I omitted the rogue antispyware programs, however, that score zoomed to a perfect 10 out of 10. Tested against the same collection of threats, [Norton AntiBot] scored 7.1, and removing the rogues from the mix brought its score only up to 7.6. In fact, [ThreatFire's] 8.6 score beats out the 8.1 points garnered by Spy Sweeper 5.2 with AntiVirus, our current Editors’ Choice for signature-based antispyware. That’s pretty impressive.
I did run a separate test using commercial keyloggers … [ThreatFire] detected every single one and successfully blocked almost all of them, scoring 9.5 out of 10. [Norton AntiBot] scored 7.1 against this same collection.
… For a sanity check, I rounded up a dozen-plus PC Magazine utilities that might look suspicious. KeyTick monitors keystrokes the way a keylogger might, BHOcop disables other BHOs, Startup Cop Pro puts itself in the start-up sequence—that sort of thing. Like [Norton AntiBot], [ThreatFire] didn’t make any erroneous accusations. It didn’t throw a single false positive alert on the PC Magazine utilities.
Looking through the stats from the PC Magazine article I have to say that the software looks rather impressive, and the free version of ThreatFire offers everything most users need. If you’re all about computer security this is one app you may want to throw on your system!
Download PC Tools ThreatFire
Thanks for the tip “S”!
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Tags: Freeware, Newly Released, Software, Applications, Internet Security
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My question is how much does it slow down your computer?
I think the best bet is to have a second computer running linux that you do all your random browsing or downloading with. Install the clamwin standalone executable, and then you can scan anything suspicious while in a safe environment.
Thanks for the info. I’ll check it out. It will be interesting to see how it performs on my puters.
I hope it does better then the firewall which has a memory leak. It was using over 1,000,000 Kb of memory.
you linked the article(first link in article) to a webroot product not pc tools product.
[cybernetnews.com]
is the correct link
Installed it on two pcs, two scans found 2 hidden xml files in my temporary internet files which naturally shouldn’t be there – otherwise fine. Am impressed with it not having any noticable effect on performance on me, desktop search has a lot bigger slowdown then this. So even though I’m not running any realtime anti-spyware app, i can keep this running.
Actually when I was using it there was very little memory and processor usage being dedicated to the program. As with some programs it my slow down your computer over time, but I didn’t notice a difference in speed at first.
That is definitely a bad memory leak, but I haven’t noticed any issues with this program.
Oops, thanks for the correct link.
I’m glad it worked out well for you, and that you didn’t have a big performance hit.