Zero-Day Attack Protection Using Threatfire

The most important aspect of a good antivirus program that is essential for proper PC security is that it is consistently updated to recognize new threats. Malware changes constantly and so does the security to protect against it. Threatfire is an excellent free utility that detects potential malware threats running in the background. It does not cause conflicts with existing malware protection software and is not a replacement. It does offer the advantage or recognizing zero-day attacks.

Malicious code will exploit security holes in operating systems, programs and applications. These are security exploits which are unknown to the vendor of your existing anti-malware software. Certainly, these security exploits will be soon recognized and antivirus security software will be updated, but what do you have to defend against freshly-born threats meanwhile? By employing ActiveDefense technology using behavior analysis, Threatfire will catch potential threats before your anti-malware software has updated the signature database.

Threatfire is a simple installation and is offered free to home users. Again, there is no conflict with existing antivirus software, so you won’t need to bother with disabling applications or creating exceptions in most cases. The installation link is: http://www.threatfire.com/

Always create a restore point prior to the installation of any new software. Set the restore point before downloading Threatfire.

Click Next to proceed. Accept the License Agreement, choose destination folder for the installation. You can go with the default folder to keep things simple. Besides, you set your restore point, right? The program opens automatically, presenting the following screen:

Click Start Scan and ThreatFire will run a quick scan. The program detected that the Windows Firewall has not been active on the system. In addition, twelve minor threats (tracking cookies) were detected on the system.

After installation, Threatfire will be running in the background to detect potential threats. As this is the free version, it will often prompt you to buy other third party software. This can be annoying, but should you decide to purchase them, you may do so and upgrade to the full version. As long as you have good anti-malware software installed on your computer, there is no need to move to the full version.

An interesting feature with Threatfire is that it will display the World Wide Detection Map, indicating the most recently identified threats detected in the community. You get an alert screen when a threat is found.

Run a full Scan

From here, run a full scan by clicking Start Scan. The scan will, of course, take some time.

The color-coded alerts indicated various degrees of threats. A yellow alert is used for potentially malicious software threats, while a red alert indicates that a malware application has been disabled and quarantined.

Threatfire opens your default web browser and opens the ThreatExpert page which details the information about the threat that was disabled. This is an interesting feature. It is always good to be educated about malware threats.

This is like a first-alert system. It is easy to operate, though some using x64 systems have had problems with it. The problems have not been major, just that the program has not worked well for everyone. For many other users, this has come in handy. The user demonstrating this article has certainly found it to be a handy addition to a PC security line-up.

Verdict:

Threatfire is a free program. The developers are not shy to advertise upgrades in various locations. New users should take note that the installation tries to install the Google Toolbar on the system. The toolbar needs to be unselected during installation to avoid this from happening.

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