How would you protect your home PC:

I like keeping everything as simple as possible, so I would use either Antivirus + Firewall or Antivirus + Sandbox. How would you protect your home computer?

 

Sandbox + Firewall + HIPS

That's what I use and it works out well. Though I do have Comodo scan unknown files with the cloud AV/Heuristics.

 

Antivirus + Firewall + HIPS + Sandbox

I'm currently using Comodo Firewall with Defense+, Shadow Defender, Sandboxie (on-demand), and Webroot Cloud AntiVirus beta.

 

Antivirus + Common sense

 

Other. Home PC, that depends, for me its router + passive defenses, for family, it would be Ubuntu or Win7 Firewall + cloud AV + behavioural soft - all auto deny, no popups.

 

At the moment i'm just using virtualisation to protect my PC. All my online activities are being done thru a linux virtual machine running on windows 7.

 

Firewall.

 

I voted AV+FW+Sandbox although my AV is used on demand along with 2 other scanners.

 

Antivirus + Firewall + my brain (knowledge)

I simply have no use for HIPS, sanboxing and other advanced protection, they cause more problems than what they are worth and take too much time to configure, update and maintain. If you are truly an advanced user, then you will know what I mean. Been malware-free for about 7 years now dropped all HIPS 5 years ago.

In the worst case scenario, I will restore an image. (only had to do once, it was not caused by malware, it was caused by HIPS).

Thanks.

 

Funny , but I don't see brains and common sense as options in the poll. Nevertheless I agree firewall and Av for me.

 

AV + Firewall + HIPS

 

Hi Hammer,

A little bit of brain helps, but experience goes a lot farther. Most of us here are experienced computer users and possess the common sense that lets us easily avoid potential disasters.

 

To protect a home PC:

1 - Norton Internet Security tweaked to make everything automatically (+ password protected).

2 - Default OS (latest Windows) recommended settings ON. IMPORTANT: don't leave anything for the user to choose! Make sure default recommended settings are really set.

3 - Make sure to install all that obvious software that regular users need, make them very visible, and set their configurations to automatically download and install updates.

 

Currently protected by........

1) Policy based Host Intrusion Prevention System
2) Anti-Executable
3) Light Virtualization
4) Network access control
5) Disk Imaging

 

Are you sure this is enough protection?

 

I'm fairly certain all the bases are covered.

 

Other. Policy based with some system hardening and built-in firewall to restrict how applications connect to the 'net.

My security setup
Win 7 x64 Ultimate Desktop:

1. Using LUA account as default
2. UAC at highest level
3. AppLocker with all rules, including DLL, enforced
4. Windows Firewall with advanced security, inbound and outbound blocked by default, restricting web-facing applications to specific remote ports and in some cases to remote ip addresses.
5. EMET, with mainly web-facing and MS Office apps configured
6. MBAM on-demand free (used sparingly)
7. Routine images of system using ShadowProtect RE disk, saving the images to two separate physical locations.
8. All sensitive data kept on a TrueCrypt volume on h/drive and USB pendrive, and also a bitlocker encrypted volume.

the following services are disabled:

• Secure Socket Tunneling service
• IP Helper
• Remote Access Connection Manager
• SSDP Discovery service
• TCP/IP NetBIOS Helper
• Workstation
• Function Discovery Resource Publication
• WinHTTP Web Proxy Auto-Discovery service

• SuRun, v1.2.0.9 – used only for convenience to easily launch some programs and Windows functionality with administrative priviledges.

Note the use of free MBAM for on-demand only. I despise realtime antivirus programs. They are mostly a resource-sucking leech on the system.

 

A man after my own heart!

 

I think it's time to upgrade your hardware

 

Modern hardware is no excuse for inefficienct allocation of resources to a useless defense mechanism.

I could have 80GB of RAM, that wouldn't mean I'd be willing to throw as much of it as programs want around just because I can.

Not to mention the heavy disk IO usage by AV's since they're routinely reading files.

 

It's a 2006 machine, but it's also an Omen:

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,1950091,00.asp

so I don't exactly need any upgrade in the foreseeable furure BTW, I bought it used for $1200, as I would never spend that much on a brand new machine.

Could not have stated it better myself

 

If my solution was heavy on I/O I wouldn't use it!

 

Eh, not heavy...but it still does have to do a lot of reads.

 

I am a little suprised that sandboxing,virtualization and the like was not off the poll chart.I guess old school AV/firewall still holds the market,especially the average users or users not willing to learn new world security.

I my self use a restricted browser sandboxed full time.I dont trust any AV alone to keep the nasties out.A few yrs back when I only ran rt scanners is when I have been infected and not since sandboxing/virtualization was added to the mix.Lucky maybe or perhaps not.


My surfing habbits are no different know then they where a few yrs back just my security set up is different and a tiny bit smarter after becoming a wilders security gang banger and software junkie.

 

AV + FIREWALL + SANDBOX + HIPS + Ondemand scanners

Not using HIPS now.. Searching for a good one.