Free Layered Malware Protection Solutions
I’ve been doing a fair amount of research in regards to finding the best *free* resources when it comes to protecting your computer from viruses, trojan horses, spyware, adware and malware in general. Free programs and applications might not be as feature rich or give you quite as much coverage as a commercial product, but i’ve found in my research that with the right combo of software, the gap between using commercial and free products is marginal.
Avast - Avast provides free anti virus protection software provided you register with them every year. Avast provides a resident scanner, which helps protect you while surfing, downloading files and email. It also has an option to do a boot time scan of your hard drive, checking files that aren’t normally accessible while in windows (system restore files, for instance) for viruses. Avast seems to give their free users updates to their virus database and software often, but if you want to schedule a scan to run at a particular time each day, you’ll have to shell out the bucks to buy the full version. When using Avast, you are best protected by enabling a “thorough scan” and selecting the check box to scan archive files. These options aren’t enabled “out of the box” - so make sure to enable those features as viruses can often hide as zipped for archive files.
AVG - AVG has a free version available just like Avast. The issue with AVG is that they often want you to upgrade to the full version to delete or contain a infect file. AVG does have the advantage of letting you run scheduled scans in their free version, but it’s not extremely clear as to how deep a scan the free version provides and doesn’t seem as thorough as Avast’s boot time or in Windows scan. However, it can run side by side with Avast with no apparent conflicts in testing thus far.
SpyBot (with tea timer) & Adaware - Spybot’s teatimer was covered in a recent blog entry for it’s usefulness in detecting registry changes and helping you prevent any unwanted installations. Spybot and Adaware are a good combo to use as one is better as detecting adware (adaware) and the other is better at detecting spyware (spybot). Neither provides resident detection, but Spybot’s teatimer runs in the background and alerts you to any app trying to make registry changes. Bare in mind a certain level of user intuitiveness is needed to make full use of Spybot. It’s not recommended for beginning users.
Spywareblaster - Spywareblaster is a preventative only tool that basically keeps an updated blacklist of ad tracking cookies, malicious active x scripts and prevents them from installing to your computer. This application is only compatible with IE and Firefox, but is definitely a useful tool in helping keep a browsing internet user safe on the internet. The main difference between the paid and free version is that the paid version auto updates it’s database while the free version requires a manual update. This might not seem like a big deal, but Spywareblaster runs quietly in the background, it will never prompt you nor will you realize or be reminded it’s running, so forgetting to update it often is a real possibility. It’s a highly customizable program that will let you disable cookie and script blocking on any listed item you wish.
Windows Defender - Microsoft has been long at work on their own anti malware application called Windows Defender. Defender will come pre-installed in Windows Vista, the next version of Windows. Defender has to scanning options - a quick scan and a full system scan. The quick scan is the default setting while full system scan is a user option. The full system scan is recommended. Windows Defender can be set to scan each day at a specified time - with the option of executing a quick scan of full scan. Windows Defender is free, but still in beta and therefore does contain some hangs up here and there, but is definitely a benefit to those searching for a free application.
Netcraft toolbar - Netcraft has created an anti phising toolbar which basically gives each site you visit a risk rating (green for safe site, red for questionable). The toolbar also tells users where a site is geographically located. This can be useful to protect against phising scams as it’s telling you where a site is actually located and the ISP/datacenter it’s using. If it’s a phising site that’s hosted elsewhere, the Netcraft toolbar is going to give different info for the ISP, thus tipping you off that something might not be right.
McAfee site advisor - Site advisor comes with McAfee internet security suite, but it’s also a free download. It functions similarly to the Netcraft toolbar (green for safe site, red for bad) but without the ISP/Datacenter info. Where site advisor excels is that it intergrates into your search results when searching engines such as Google, yahoo, msn, etc. It places a green check box for a good URL, a question mark for a unknown quantity and a excalamtion mark for a warning and a red X for a bad site. Site advisor relies on their own tests as well as end user input to determine risk levels and generally speaking, a red site might not always mean you’ll get an attempted drive by installation on your computer, but should proceed with caution. By clicking on each URLS symbol that appears in search results, you can read McAfee comments as well as end user comments about the site or link in question.
As always, avoiding warez sites, porn sites and scanning all downloads before opening or executing them (rather they come from a reputable site or a rather ambiguous P2P site or program) is always a good idea. You might be advised to tweak your active x settings so that active x scripts don’t automatically install to your browser. Firewall programs can’t help you when malware installs itself as a browser object, because as far as the firewall application is concerned, the malware is just part of the browser in this case (that being said, firewall programs are still good to have enabled) . Doing nightly scans using all your programs if possible and, this is important, keeping your programs and their databases fresh as possible by making sure they automatically update or you manually update them often as possible is very important and often times an underrated and overlooked part of keeping your computer safe. Remember, new malware pops up on a daily basis, so keeping your programs fresh is very important. Keeping Windows updated is also another key factor.
It’s important to remember that years ago, putting viruses on your computer was all about causing vandalism by destroying files and just making you miserable/inconveniencing you, but while vandalism was once the point of malicious sofware, the focus of these scripts is now identity theft and stealing your money - so it’s more important to stay protected then it ever has been in the past. Also, if you really like a free program, donate a few dollars or buy the full version to help support the developers.