The end of ThreatFire...

I was wondering if Symantec transferred some of Threatfire's technology to their Norton antivirus products?

 

How often have we seen this script before, where a non-mainstream 3rd-party security application fizzles into obscurity after a few years of promising development? I've got a small handful of licenses (Regedit, System Safety Monitor, Malware Defender, and potentially Jetico Firewall) sitting doing nothing because the developers disappeared into oblivion, dropped their development or jumped ship to somewhere else along with their initiatives.

There are some exceptions like Sandboxie, but they remain few and far between who appear as though they will be around for a long time and provide a first-rate product, but for the most part you're relegated to either the "big box" mainstream products who continue to unleash, in many cases, sloppily coded products that perform below average, yet fool the majority of people into purchasing them, or one is forced to think outside the box (not such a bad thing), and engage in some enthusiastic research, and develop a security strategy that encompasses built-in features of the O/S, with little to no reliance on 3rd party applications.

 

Some nostalgia. My memory here totally fails me at the moment. See if anyone can name this product, if only to refresh my memory. What did it do? I think maybe it was some sort of BB, but I don't really remember. But everyone here was much impressed. What happened to it? Symantec absorbed it?

 

It was once owned by PCTools. Maybe you can remember Pctools firewall Plus. Eventually, Symantec absorbed Pctools into the company and development signifacantly slowed down. Threatfire was a popular BB of it's time until it became outdated and no longer maintained like right now.

 

No No No. This wasn't Threatfire. Nor SSM. Not sure if it was actually a BB. Maybe more malwarish. It had an unusual name. Never mind. Ah!! I remember now. Don't recall its original name but it transmuted into Norton AntiBot.

 

Oh, I thought you where talking about Threatfire.

 

Soo...now it looks that we have probably only one more standalone BB besides Mamutu...Micropoint...that is Cyberhawk successor but not so well-known as other brothers.
DSA, TF...already died as standalone apps...who next?

 

Mamutu

 

I was kinda late to the WSS party but i did use ThreatFire for like a month back when i joined WSS. Good memories.

I don't think Mamutu will be dead anytime soon. They can still improve it a lot and Emsisoft seems to be a very dedicated company, at most they would release it as a free version like with their older tools. (I hope they continue developing it)

 

As I mentioned, BBs have been incorporated into every AV product including EAM. There's no need anymore to have Threatfire installed when one product takes care of looking out for virus & spyware threats and removing them.

TF was great in its day and its kind of proactive role has been adopted throughout the computer security industry. The AV module in my ZA suite has an active BB to watch for unexpected system behavior changes and alert the user to them.

 

We all expect this, sooner or later, when we saw the company acquisition...

 

I like running a stand-along BB

 

Primary Response Safe Connect by Sana Security. (A behavioral blocker)
Licensed to Norton for their Anti-bot.
Sold to and killed by AVG.

 

Speaking of behavior blockers, what is the main difference between a HIPS and BB? Does HIPS alert you if a program tries to alter areas protected by the HIPS, while a BB just monitors a program for suspicious behavior?

 

Both can complement each other and protect the computer and processes on it in different ways. The more layers you have - the more difficult it is for malware to actually do harm.

 

they are very powerfull

 

Not entirely true. Sana's tech still lives in free and paid AVG versions. Indeed it's not stand alone anymore but it's free and if you disable AV component you basically get stand alone behavior blocker which is pretty good.

I also hope one day avast!'s Behavior Shield will start to also block things and there are also plans for Comodo IS 6.x to get the behavior blocker like ThreatFire or Sana was in their days. An actual behavior blocker, not just sandbox or HIPS. But that will come sometime later...

 

very true Razor

 

Spot on, basically a BB could be called a "smarter HIPS" since it only alerts you of suspicious changes/behaviors whereas HIPS tends to alert you of every single thing just for the sake of annoying you . . . kidding hahahahaha.

 

some small companies started all....... sandboxie! cyberhawk! winpatrol! spybot!

 

Not quite...there are the probably the latest tests of TF
ThreatFire vs Ransomware.Celas (29.08.2012)
-http://forum.safegroup.pl/recenzje/threatfire-vs-ransomware-celas-t7179.html?hilit=threatfire#p171490
ThreatFire vs Sality (28.08.2012)
-http://forum.safegroup.pl/recenzje/threatfire-vs-rozne-zagrozenia-t7169.html?hilit=threatfire#p171389
and the test TF against many kind malware (23.05.2012)
-http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pyRliGiJjt0&feature=youtu.be

 

I'm sorry you are basically correct, I should have stated not that AVG killed PRSC but merely emasculated it, as they did to ScoketShield aka LinkScanner.

 

symantec kills another one, i was surprised that they decided to tun PCtools as a separate brand,i thought they might just steamroll it as well.. perhaps 2 years down the line LOL

 

I think it will happen eventually. It's just a matter of time...

 

They'll continue the PC Tools brand name; the point of the acquisition was to have PC Tools sell as "Norton Lite", a cheap version with somewhat reduced features to compete against cheaper products on store shelves, e.g. Iolo etc. for Performance products and smaller players like AVG, Emsisoft, Vipre etc. for Security products. This allows them to continue selling the Norton branded products at a higher price, thus maintaining a "premium" brand image.

Threatfire, PC Tools Firewall, etc. weren't really competing against anything in the mainstream and that is why significantly less resources were given to these products after the acquisition. They were always meant to go, because there's no cheap BB or Firewall being sold at mainstream.

PC Tools today is just Symantec's value brand; the resources, money and manpower used to develop these products are significantly lesser than Norton products, for example. For what it's worth, you can see they did continue developing the ThreatFire drivers and components as the latest version of PC Tools Internet Security contains version 4.11 of the ThreatFire drivers.

I don't think they really need it, just like they didn't really need Sygate's technology. I do think Symantec uses data from PC Tools' ThreatExpert though.

EDIT: I do think it's outrageous they charge $2 for a 60-day trial. They could have at least given 60 days of free protection.....