Qwik fix

Qwik fix OS/APP hardening looks and sound very good -

"Qwik-Fix™ provides another layer of essential security by closing off the pathways that worms and viruses use to penetrate your PC.

Qwik-Fix Pro is the first security application to utilize Active System Hardening which fundamentally changes the way Windows computers are secured. By blocking the underlying security vulnerabilities in Windows itself, Qwik-Fix Pro closes the openings that attackers use to damage and hijack your computer. Traditional anti-virus and anti-spyware tools are only able to detect and clean up your PC after the damage has been done and your computer is hopelessly infected. Qwik-Fix Pro prevents installed spyware and malware from being able to exploit your computer"

"Qwik-Fix Pro protects against thousands of specific threats by blocking the root cause of the vulnerabilities they exploit to gain unauthorized access to Windows computers. The table below lists a sampling of well-known threats that Qwik-Fix Pro protected against. Because Qwik-Fix Pro blocks the underlying vulnerabilities, it automatically blocks any other specific threats or variants that try to exploit the same vulnerability."



But With Fsecure, Outpost and PG necessary or pointless (SAFEXP, Harden,SEcureIT are similar? and free)


How do people rate this - any problems?

 

See the first link in my sig

Yes, I like the app, and no, I haven't had any issues with it, even their beta. Their customer support leaves some to be desired, however.

 

Notok,

Thanks I saw your comments in the buffer over flow thread a while ago.

I looked at this a while ago - it was your sig that got me interested in this app once again.

At the moment I'm considering what I think I need. I'm also considering SNS but that another story rather like that at the moment.

 

You should check out the new PreEmpt beta, then. It's totally stable, and quite nice. Computer Security Tool (http://www.computersecuritytool.com/) is another good one that will be adding some great new features soon.. they also have much better support than Pivx. I use both, personally, as they each cover some things that the other do not.

 

Thanks - I'll add that to my do list

 

@Notok - u should also add BugOff to ur list of system hardening tools.

 

WSFuser: Qwik-Fix and SecureIt both handle the same things as BugOff. That's the same reason I don't include all the other little apps, like DSOStop, HTAStop, etc. etc., the idea is to make it as comprehensive as possible with the least amount of hassle. Of course the two paid apps together are the best route to go, as they handle pretty much everything and more, including protection for 3rd party apps, not just the system.

 

I think it's better to support the free apps or soon, as things look to be heading, we'll have to pay for every little piece of software that we want. Remember the days when almost everthing was free on the net? Well if everyone keeps supporting only the payware that's what everything will soon be, payware.

 

@ Notok

Can you perhaps give some more details about PreEmpt? Does it have any new features compared to Qwik Fix? A screenshot also would be nice. About BugOff, I´m still using it because it´s the only one who gives the option to quickly toggle certain settings, can´t do the same in Qwik Fix, Secure It and Samurai.

 

Actually you can toggle the settings in Qwik-Fix.. go into the advanced settings and it's on the second tab, I believe. If you only want to toggle them for a little while you can also just right-click on the tray icon and "suspend protection", which is the main thing I like about Qwik-Fix.

PreEmpt doesn't show any new options, but I'll say that they do cover more than they show. Since they haven't talked about it and don't show options in the UI, I'll leave it at that for the time being.. but if you're clever I'm sure you can figure it out I will say, though, that it's stuff that no other hardening tool covers. They mentioned that one of the main reasons for the new design is to make it easier to implement fixes and make them for more apps other than just Windows, so I expect it to expand much more soon.

And here's some screenshots for ya

 

Security settings:

 

Ok, here's a new feature; alerts when something tries to exploit certain vulnerabilities

 

Lol, oops.. after posting those I decided to look at their forums, and as of today PreEmpt is no longer beta.

 

Thanks Notok

The GUI sure looks better when compared to the old one. And I´ve already read about the new features in PreEmpt, it looks interesting (see link). Let´s hope they will come up with protection for other apps as well. And let´s hope IE7 won´t require that many fixes.

About BugOff, for example, at the moment I have disabled the mhtml protocol, so that means I can´t view MHT files anymore. But I can change this with only on click, in Qwik Fix you have to turn on/off all activeX controls/Url Protocols.

http://forums.pivx.com/index.php?showtopic=135#

 

Btw, especially the "Application Specific Virtualized Registry" looks like a feature that will differentiate PreEmpt from products like Secure-It, Samurai, looks very nice! Now it will hopefully not break other applications.

"A new technology featured in PreEmpt 2.0 creates virtual registry sandboxes for different applications. Almost all of the configuration of a windows system is contained in a database called the windows registry, which is shared between all of the applications on a system.

This means that a configuration change that would improve the security of Internet Explorer might cause another application to function incorrectly. By providing separate configurations of windows for each application on a system PreEmpt 2.0 is able to enforce far more secure configurations for some applications without causing compatibility problems with others."