The "How to Protect yourself from malware!" Guide.

Welcome to Major Geeks!

Thanks for your comments.

There are quite a few tools that we don't list. That does not make them bad nor does it mean they are good. Comodo is listed in the How to protect thread in the antivirus and also in the firewall area. We do not go into some of the other areas of protection in detail for a couple reasons. One, the thread is meant to be as useful to ALL people with all computers ( old and new ) as possible. The newer forms of protection can be problematic for older/slower PCs with smaller amounts of memory. The second reason is that experience as shown that if all of the instructions in that thread are properly followed, you don't need sandboxes or HIPS anyway and you will not suffer from the effects that they have on PCs. Many many people of complained to us about how slow their PCs were after using tools like Threatfire and sandbox type software. In addition, use of these tools caused many PC novices to intermediate users all kinds of other grief and loss of information and loss of settings that they did not realize they were losing due to the sandbox affects.

Also we have had many, many, many cases where people have had all this kind of protection you mention installed, and still have gotten severely infected. And all this protection just made it harder to manually clean the PC. It did not stop the infections. The educated end user ( which is what that sticky is pushing ) is the most important piece of protection a user has.

So while we could add many more modern day type security suites with HIPS, sandboxing, etc, we prefer to still keep the thread more generic for a greater sample of PCs. Yes we could write another procedure for more modern PCs with greater horsepower, but we do not find them to be necessary. The question of whether they are really even needed or that effective can even be debatable.

All this being stated, it does not mean that for some people additional layers of protection would not be helpful. Some people could potentially protect themselves from themself by adding more protection If they however were properly educated in the area of computer security and hazards, they would likely not need the added protection. I have dozens of PCs running with limited protection, and even have some running ( for test purposes ) with no antivirus and no antispyware. They just have a hardware and software firewall. They have never once been infected, but this is due to proper surfing habits, and I would not recommend this configuration to most people.

On other test PCs where I have the below:

• basic antivirus that includes antispyware
• a software firewall
• hardware firewall
• SpywareBlaster ( as recommended in the sticky )
• Spybot ( just SDHelper and Immunize as recommended)

I cannot get infected unless I go out of my way to get infected and click on things that anyone should be smart enough to know that they should not click on them.