Three New Freeware Security Offerings: It's A B C Time!

This post is brought to you today from the letters A, B, and C.

A - AVG Announces Anti-Rootkit Application

AVG (Grisoft) announced today that they are adding a freeware standalone anti-rootkit product to their lineup: AVG Offers New Free Anti-Rootkit to Fight Severe Hidden Threats

I downloaded the application today, but didn't have time to install it. I just unpacked it and peeked around for a bit.

It looks like it loads some system level drivers to function properly, so it probably won't be something you will be running off your USB sticks. However the interface I saw was nice, and it looked to support "updates" to the scan engine, which is a nice feature over having to download a new "packaged" rootkit scanner in total each time.

I love AVG-Free (antivirus) as well as AVG-AntiSpyware. Both are offered as freeware products and I am really impressed with their performance. So this will be a great third-addition to their security lineup for home/personal users.

There is also a PDF guide on the product you can review on their download site.

For Windows XP/2000 systems only.

B - Blink Personal Edition Security Suite

eEye Digital Solutions: Blink Personal Edition - The security minded folks at eEye Digital Security are offering their personal security suite as a free 1-year subscription for personal and home office users in the States.

It provides Anti-Virus, Anti-Spyware, a Firewall (system and application), Anti-Phishing, HIPS (Host based Intrusion Prevention), Buffer overflow protection, Registry/EXE protection, zero-day protection, and Host protection. That's a bunch of stuff for a single security "suite" application.

While I generally do not recommend security "suites," this might be worth looking into for someone who really wants an all-in-one solution instead of taking the herding-cats approach of dealing with multiple separate security applications.

While I use eEye to monitor breaking "wild" threats/news, I haven't yet personally used any of their products. They do have some "higher-end" freeware network security utilities as well.

When I get more time I will try to go back and take a closer look at it and dig up some reviews.

For Windows XP/2000 systems only

C - Comodo Acquires BOClean

Comodo just picked up PSC's BOClean, a well established and mature anti-trojan application, and will be adding it to their extensive stable of free security products as well.

BOClean seems to have a very strong user following. Another product I haven't used before but seems to be quite popular with its longtime users. No "Comodo" download for it yet, but in the forum thread I linked to, they say it should be available again very soon.

While none of these appear to be applications one could tote around on a USB stick as you go from relative to relative's house on the weekend geek-support tour of duty, it is nice to have some new options to take with you and leave behind installed on a system. Not sure you would want to install and run them all at the same time.

Current version of BOClean works with all versions of Windows95,98,NT,2000, ME and XP.

Unless you wear tin-foil on your head, or do naughty things on the pc.

Course, if you were going that far, you might just want to run Linux or Apple OS-X....but that's yet another post.

Too busy tonight except for this brief post. Had to bring work home tonight...

I do have lots of fresh new fun finds waiting in the hopper....

Stay tuned and be patient!

--Claus V.