Help selecting the right security apps

I'd like to take this opportunity to thank Blue and everyone else to offered their advice and suggestion. Very much appreciated.

 

What that does is just tracks what changes the program makes to your system. It does this so that if you accidently allow something that turns out to be malware, you can just go to the programs tab and delete the program, and it will undo everything that program has done. If you're removing malaware, that equates to "one click malware removal"

I believe NOD32 is first in the chain, so it would pick things up first. If NOD32 didn't detect it, however, Online Armor would alert you to the trojan trying to run. I know they're going to enhance the web-sheild in upcoming versions, so then things will have even less of a chance to get through. They'll be adding a lot of other things as well, which well let you slim down your security setup even further without sacrificing any protection features. You might wait for that before buying much more.. maybe go with some freebies in the meantime, if you still want more.

Honestly, though, between NOD32, Ewido, and Online Armor, you should be pretty well set. Things like SpywareBlaster and your on-demand scanners are good to keep around and use once in a while as well. I don't really think there's much need for a second AV. If any AV is going to be weak, it's going to be in trojans and spyware, which is why you have Ewido and the other scanners. Anything that slips through those will probably be dealt with by Online Armor.

Exactly Don't go for anything that you just end up Allowing everything on. There are almost always equivalant alternatives, and many you may find easier to use effectively.

 

Good point. I'll just stick to PG and Online Armor to handle the HIPS side of things for now. I wont be using regdefend or appdefend as it will be a waste of money for me.

Unfortunatly my mini security review is not over. My last stage is to look at system hardening tools such as secure-it, Harden-it and safe-xp. The fun never stops. Tips and suggestons are welcomed as always.

 

Just my $0.02 worth here.... but I agree with Blue on 99.9%

I like trying stuff and got in on the ground floor so to speak with Online Armor testing when it pretty much first came out.

First, before HIPS, I ran KAV PRO as the mainstay supplemented by:

AdAware PRO with AdWatch
Spybot [did/still do not like 'Tea Timer' personally though]
SpywareBlaster and SpywareGuard.

As a usual regime of testing, I always try to alter things every few weeks or so to see what alerts me.

AdWatch was ALWAYS the first to pop up, followed by SG.

Then I got onto Online Armor, testing from the first Beta with some amazing results even early on.

Then I found Arovax Shield, bit like SpywareGuard and it alerted very quickly also.
AdWatch was always first to pop up followed [almost instaneously] by Arovax Shield then SpywareGuard.

Also installed MS Antispyware since its lengthened licence to 2006, but found that very slow to respond, toooo slow for my liking in Real Time.
So I tried MSAS with all other apps turned off, and it still took like 4-10 seconds for pop-up to alert me I had changed my Homepage even. Not good IMO.
It very well may be an excellent general spyware/malware scanner, etc. but I WANT instant results in REALTIME, not down the track so it went, This very well may be only happening on my system, on others it 'may' work instantly, not for me.


Now, upon testing [changing Homepage/altering HOSTS/add ToolBars/etc] with the following running:
AdWatch/Arovax Shield/SpywareGuard/Online Armor............it's....

Online Armor first up out of the box. ALWAYS. Nothing else pops up at all, because OA wants first crack at it and when I 'BLOCK', of course nothing else gets a chance since OA instantly blocks the app from trying to install/alter/change/etc. whatever it was I wanted to test.

Turning off OA it's still AdWatch first up and it also is instant.


Now I run the following:

KAV PRO
Kerio 4 PRO
Online Armor
AdWatch
Arovax Shield...........all as RealTime apps with SpywareBlaster still looking after IE/Firefox in background
and AdAware PRO and Spybot S&D as scanners.

Dropped: MSAS/spywareGuard which I deemed redundant now.

As a side note, Kerio 4 PRO blocks a hell of a lot in RT also aside from general FW blocking, like Web Filtering of pages, Cookies, Advertisements, Pop-ups.

When OA gets into it's next version, I reckon the time to drop some more may come, but at the moment, they are all working together fine, so having them still in RT in background may be of benefit as back up still.

Cheers, TAS

 

Hehe, it never hurts to give things a try. Take a look at the first page in my sig for hardening stuff

 

Quite a bit of IMHO unnecessary overlap here.

I have pretty low opinions of 2 of the 4 you list, not that I wouldn't run those two if i had nothing else but i wouldn't run those 2 if i had a better choice and you do. Have a better choice i mean.

 

Well I hada look at Safe XP, Secure-it and harden-it and backed down before I accepted all the changes. To be honest I don't feel safe about using them. I've read a few stories here about program 'break' and system malfunction etc. I think I'll stick to my usual method of going through the security policies etc and manually making changes. Advantage of this way is I can use registry cleaners like Ace Utilites.

Will I need antikey loggers (e.g. snoopfree etc.) and anti rootkit apps (e.g. unhackme, rootkit revealer, black light etc. etc.) with my chosen set-up below?

Outpost
NOD32
Process Guard
Online Armor
Ewido(full)
A2 (free on demand scanner only)
Spyware Blaster
Microsoft AntiSpyware (on demand scanner only)
Ad-Aware (free On demand scanner only)
Spybot S&D (free on demand scanner only)

 

Probably not.
Online Armor has pretty good antikeylogging (hook based only so far which is the same as snoopfree does) so you probably don't need snoopfree.

Still it's up to you. As Blue will tell you , your setup below is one that is armed to the gills.

Even then, you might find products that conceivably might either be better in covering some area being a specialist product for that area alone, or might cover some exotic area not covered by even a full armed to the gills setup.

When faced with such a situation, only you yourself can decide on whether the tradeoff in resources , complexity is worth the slight improvement in security.

Be careful though, don't let paranonia drive you into running multiple specialistic anti-x type software such that you end up with a specialist anti-malware guard for each different malware class!!

My advise is to stick to the base Blue formula, and not worry too much.
It's very easy to drive yourself crazy....




Outpost
NOD32
Process Guard
Online Armor
Ewido(full)
A2 (free on demand scanner only)
Spyware Blaster
Microsoft AntiSpyware (on demand scanner only)
Ad-Aware (free On demand scanner only)
Spybot S&D (free on demand scanner only)[/QUOTE]