Sunbelt personal FireWall For vista.

I think it must be only FP for some reason. I am running this product right now and Vipre AV as well as SuperAntispyware and they do not detect any adware / spyware in the firewall product. I also know my experience with Sunbelt so far has been very positive and I would find it hard to believe they would have included anything malicious in thier products. FPs can happen wit any AV, some more than others. Why not submit it to you AV company and see what they say about it before a judgement is made as to the validity.

 

Thanks for the update.... sounds reasonable... why would Sunbelt stuff malware/spyware into their products? Doesn't make a lot of sense....

 

SPF does not have a quarantine. The only thing that would approximate a quarantine is Host Intrusion Prevention System (HIPS).

HIPS: In four years I have only had three events: "Live Mesh (beta)", "UltraVNC (beta)" and "LogMeIn". They were blocked, I was notified, and within seconds I created exceptions for them. If you know what those programs are then you know that HIPS is a great feature to have.

NIPS: Network Intrusion Prevention System recognizes (I guess) around 1,500 - 2,000 different attacks in three categories of threat level. Many with links to specific Microsoft (or other authority) definitions of the attack. I deny all levels of threat and I am unaware of ever having a false positive. I have followed through on several attacks all with quick positive results (having had all the specific details to make investigation simple). Paid/trial versions only.

I have used SPF since before Sunbelt purchased it... previously known as "Kerio Personal Firewall". Every year I try other top ranked power-user firewalls, willing to pay most any price hoping for my ideal but keep coming back to SPF. I demand fast, light, powerful, flexible, high confidence factor: this is difficult and very time consuming to research, at least 100 hours every year. Still looking...

* I would not recommend SPF to novices; but it is well laid out, intuitive, very powerful and simple for professionals. SPF can do everything I could want in a firewall except the following.
* I wish it would allow copying data directly from and alert windows and GUI logs (I created links to the actual log files).
* I wish it could do online lookup of remote address registrations but it does resolve addresses, protocols, and ports as log options, also choice of applications by name, path, or description and this is useful.
* I sometimes I wish I could sort columns in logs. All other windows you can sort columns.
* I wish it had a feature to remove rules that are no longer applicable if file referenced is no longer on the system.
* A "temporary install mode" would be useful for known clean applications (à la Comodo).

As someone who has used lots and lots and lots of P2P warez since BBS before WWW I am very security conscious and demand a lot of personal power and flexibility in a firewall. The above features added to SPF would be closer to my ideal.

COMPLAINTS:
* for 18 months Sunbelt said Vista version would be ready soon. Every month I was pissed, waiting to install on my Vista laptop.
* Other than updated definitions there are no user observable changes to SPF since Kerio version years ago. I would have like one or two of my wish list included in last major update.

By professional rather than novice-ware I mean: It really does not have any novice options in the GUI but most any advanced feature can be disabled. Use of regular expressions in site filtering, quite advanced packet filtering, remote administration option, no slider controls to set prompt level or filter aggression. I seem to remember a novice option during install but have never used it.

Now that I am old and retired I "buy" software I like rather than "borrow" so I don't need this level of firewall as much, but I like the balance of fast, powerful, and (to my mind) friendly and well organized.

It definitely is not for everyone,
Fathom

ps. I have had no problems with SPF on my Vista or XP machines since after it came out of beta (which I tried early on with some misgivings). And no history of problems on XP before Vista beta release. Getting firewalls stable on Vista does seem to be a big challenge, it took SPF two years.

 

I have "Avira Personal" and did a full scan last night. No hits, even with aggressive heuristic setting. So it would be the AntiAd/Spyware part of Avira Premium as you indicated, but I can't imagine why...

Fathom

Reference note for those unfamiliar:
"Avira Personal" free, fast AntiVir, AntiDialer, AntiRootkit, AntiPhishing
"Avira Premium" adds AntiAd/Spyware, POP3 and Web protection

Good choices. I search almost as many hours each year for new fast, flexible, reliable viri protection as I do net protection. Third or fourth year with Avira. It is good to be retired and the time to shop around and test drive many products (to match personal preferences and requirements). I can not imagine doing this for the home as a family man.

 

Well, I am not sure what its called. It was blocked and excluded, I am not sure what was the exact term Sunbelt uses.
Well, good for you it worked. It didn't for me.

I am putting up a part of the logs I sent to Sunbelt.