Free Anti-Malware
Free Anti-Malware
Today more than ever, you need to protect your computer systems against intrusion by spyware, viruses, Trojans, and the like. Malware is big business now. Programmers for the Dark Side write tight, tested, evil code for pay, and their bosses rake in money by capturing passwords, stealing credit card numbers, and duping the gullible. Now there's a business sector that's booming! Fortunately you can protect yourself without shelling out a penny. It's true that paid solutions like Prevx 3.0, Spyware Doctor with AntiVirus 6, and Webroot AntiVirus with AntiSpyware 6.1 score better than the freebies in testing, but you can improve your defenses by layering multiple free products.
Yes, I always advise against running more than one real-time anti-malware product, since there can be conflicts. In particular, I wouldn't use avast! antivirus 4.8 Home Edition and AVG Anti-Virus Free 8.0 together, since they are both traditional signature-based products with real-time protection. But the free edition of MalwareBytes' Anti-Malware 1.36 is a scan-only product with no real-time protection, which makes it safer as a companion product for either.
Adding behavior-based protection to your traditional signature-based protection naturally increases your coverage. The behavior-based zero-day threat protection in ThreatFire 4.5 is specifically designed to work alongside signature-based products. Panda Cloud Antivirus also includes behavioral detection, and it keeps its intelligence in the cloud, not on your PC. It's not as fast or powerful as Prevx, another in-the-cloud product, but it's a free, lightweight addition.
Free Spam Filtering
Wouldn't you like some good news for a change? Want free money from a long-lost relative in Nigeria? Hope to win a European lottery that you didn't even enter? Just check your e-mail! Spammers may well have filled it with messages of hope…false hope, that is. Spam about V!agra and Ci@lis is down; spam about money is up—not surprising these days. And, hey, if "your bank" sends an e-mail about some dire account problem that will send you to the poorhouse, don't click any links. Navigate directly to the bank site yourself. Of course, a decent antispam app could fix that problem, too.
Maybe you're one of the lucky ones whose ISP or Web-based e-mail provider includes server-level spam filtering as part of the service. But if spam is reaching your inbox you can rely on the free SPAMfighter Standard to keep it out. Like the highly successful commercial products Cloudmark Desktop and iHateSpam, SPAMfighter is a community-based filter. That means it will let through a small amount of spam (less than most other antispam products), but it will never throw a valid personal message into the spam bin. It inserts a small advertising footer in your outgoing messages, but that's a small price to pay.
Free Firewall
When old-timers fell on hard times, they'd describe their plight by moaning, "The wolf is at the door!" These days we might say, "The hacker is at the port." If you don't have some kind of firewall protection, a hacker or network-based worm could waltz right in through an open port and take control of your computer. Certainly, if you have no other protection, you should make sure the Windows Firewall in XP or Vista is turned on.
Free third-party personal firewalls ZoneAlarm 8.0 and Comodo Firewall Pro 3.0 do more than the built-in, though. Naturally they block hack attacks, masking your computer's ports so they're completely invisible from the outside. But they also protect against betrayal from within by limiting which programs are allowed to connect with the Internet. Initially they can be noisy, popping up a flood of queries asking whether this or that program should be allowed access. After a while, the pop-ups diminish. Comodo does automatically configure access for many programs, which may cut down on pop-ups. ZoneAlarm reserves automatic configuration for its paid versions
Free Parental Control
If your kids are all out working part-time jobs after school to help make the mortgage payments, well, you don't need a parental-control system. For the younger ones, you'll want to put some form of parental control in place, so you don't have to worry about what they're doing online while you're off working your second and third jobs.
Windows Vista has parental control built in. For each user, you can set it to block Web sites in 11 categories and optionally block downloads. You can configure a weekly grid of times when this user is allowed on the computer. You can block games based on ESRB ratings, or block specific programs. That's all, but that may be enough.
Not using Vista? You can get a similar level of protection from K9 Web Protection. It blocks bad Web sites, schedules Internet use (rather than overall computer user), and monitors all sites visited. Alas, these limits are system-wide, not per-user, so they could be a problem.
If you want full-scale parental control rivaling paid products like Net Nanny 6.0 and Safe Eyes 5.0, consider OnlineFamily.Norton. It includes some high-end features, such as e-mail notification, Instant Messaging control, and full remote configuration. The catch: It's free only until January 2010. But, hey, maybe the economy will turn around by then!
Free Password Management
Your finances are already stretched and stressed. The last thing you need is for some goon to capture your financial Web-site passwords and steal what little cash you have left, or charge your credit card for luxuries you've been denying yourself.
Sure, the security mavens say you should make every password different and use strong passwords like Bftsplk&Be9WgSaMxyzptlk for each. But nobody can remember more than a couple of those, and most of us have dozens of passwords to track. Both Firefox and Internet Explorer will offer to save your passwords for you. Don't let them: Their password storage is not secure!
For free and effective password management, consider LastPass 1.50. Feature-wise it beats out commercial competition like RoboForm and 1-Click SignupShield Suite 5. It stores your encrypted passwords online, decrypting them only locally. And in case you wondered whether IE- and Firefox-stored passwords are really so insecure, LastPass extracts those passwords during installation and offers to store them securely instead.
Free Help Switching Brands
You're ready now. You've made the decision. Rather than renew your current security solution, you're going to bite the bullet and replace it. Unfortunately, sometimes they'd rather fight than let you switch. If the uninstall process doesn't completely clean up the old product, it may prevent you from installing your new, free solutions. That's where AppRemover 1.5 comes in. This free utility has one purpose in life—to clean up the leftovers from security suites that were incompletely uninstalled. Out with the old! In with the new!
A Free Suite?
As you can see, it's possible to cobble together a passable security suite using only free utilities. Firewall, anti-malware, antispam, even parental control—it's all out there for the taking. And since the components are all free, you can pick and choose, try and retry, until you have a package that suits you. Who knows, you may keep your free home-made suite even after the economic recovery in… well… whenever it happens.
