ThreatFire Antivirus
ThreatFire is a behavioral antivirus program. This basically means it runs with an experience based engine, a good comparison would be (this is for you chess players) Deep Blue vs. Gary Kasparov. The engineers at IBM created Deep Blue with only knowledge of Kasparov’s chess play. Threatfire is the same way; they have loaded it with all the definitions of viruses available and have permitted the software to look for patterns around these virus definitions. By definition, ThreatFire is not a standalone anti virus program; it does protect you from malware, spyware, trojans, viruses, and worms. There is a one year trial version of ThreatFire where is provides free virus removal and scan; however, after the year is over you must buy it. ThreatFire costs $29.95 to secure three computers for the period of one year, the only differences between the paid and unpaid versions is the paid (Pro) version adds on scheduled scan and clean (virus removal, spyware removal, and worm removal), also you get telephone tech support. The free version only gets e-mail tech support.
ThreatFire blocked all of my sample malware and trojans. I would guess that because of its behavior based structure, the program will block some 0-day threats too. A 0-day threat is an undisclosed vulnerability in an operating system, a cracker will use this finding to take over as many remote systems as they can before the vulnerability is discovered and patched. Threatfire doesn’t have its own free virus removal tool. Instead, once it detects an anomaly, it marks the file as hostile and the primary antivirus program takes care of the infection.
The Threatfire user base is pretty intelligent. I have been looking around on their security forums and help forums and while, like most forums on the internet, there are your mindless zombies (trolls), the majority of the group seems to be “with it”. One blog I found that I quite like was their research blog; this site is affiliated with ThreatFire directly, so here is the link (http://blog.threatfire.com/). When I read through blogs created by antivirus program companies, I first look for anything that says “Program XXX detects blah better than the rest”, if I find statements like that, I take the rest of the blog with a grain of salt. Research blogs are not advertisements. Regardless, their blog is thought out and easily read. I’d recommend reading it if you’d like to know more information.
Before I wrap this article up, I’d like to point out a (arguable) major flaw with this program, it does not take any action until the virus/spyware/malware tries to take action. While you could argue that a dormant virus is harmless, I’d rather not have it there in the first place.
In closing Threatfire is a behavior based antivirus, it sits alongside your existing antivirus solution and they work together to protect your computer. ThreatFire is free for a year, but costs about $30 thereafter. It works very well and picked up threats in a very timely manner. Overall, I was very impressed by it and the extra layer of protection is reassuring!
