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Comodo Internet Security -- a cautionary tale?

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Curt:
... using the situation to tell about a giveaway from sharewareonsale and Webroot:
"Sale ends in 1 day 22½ hrs or until sold out": http://sharewareonsale.com/s/webroot-secureanywhere-antivirus-sale

Is the program working via some virtual cloud? I don't know yet, I was so far just drawn by the timing and how lite it seems to be.-Curt (April 13, 2015, 03:31 AM)
--- End quote ---

I am amazed. I had a strange feeling that it was not necessary to uninstall or even stop my antivirus, before installing WebRoot. Flashes from the past, security related programs freezing the computer when fighting to be the boss. But I took a d e e p breath, and installed the 798KB program. And I was right!! WebRoot is running at the same time as Microsoft Security Essentials, and they are not fighting each other (yet)! Maybe this shows that WebRoot not really is "here" (on my PC), but is working via some virtual cloud?

And Yes, it only took 5 minutes to install and set up.





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Modified:
In order to register and get a free license, one must follow the "My Account" -button, and be both humble and patient. I am not, so I have not registered for a key. Example: After creating a password with AT LEAST NINE (9) characters, you are next ordered to:>Enter a memorable word or number, using a minimum of 6 characters (excluding < >). Choose a code that is easy to remember, because you'll be asked to enter two characters of it every time you log in. For example, the system might ask you to enter the first and fifth characters of this code.< And then you are told to also create a security question!!

Of course I did not accept all this, and have now removed the thing

TaoPhoenix:
But I took a d e e p breath, and installed the 798KB program. ...Maybe this shows that WebRoot not really is "here" (on my PC), but is working via some virtual cloud?
-Curt (April 13, 2015, 12:06 PM)
--- End quote ---

I'm as much a fan of ultra-tight code as anyone, but how can 798k of a "full suite" security program do anything thorough enough to be legitimately productive? And how would that even begin to operate via the cloud?

Anyone have some high grade technical feedback on this?

x16wda:
- Checksum everything
- Send it to the cloud like a DNS RBL lookup
- If your PC doesn't report back in, blacklist that checksum for the next poor fellow that tries to run it  :P

oblivion:
This has presented me with such a lot of things to think about that I've done some proper research. Well, I've relied on others to do proper testing, I guess...

Anyway, the upshot seems to be that Webroot's offering above is generally considered pretty good, but I debated the subject with myself for long enough that I lost out on the free offering.  :-[ Oh well... I've removed MSE, anyway. The general view seems to be that it's not really fit for purpose any more -- ditto Defender in Win8.

I haven't settled on a final answer yet -- I'm keeping updated versions of Clamwin and MBAM handy but my current best hope is Panda Free Antivirus, which appears to be a similarly lightweight product to Webroot and seems quite well thought of. (I tried Panda AV many, many years ago and wasn't over-impressed but that would've been on a Win98 machine and the world's quite a different place now!)

One thing, though: my goodness, but my netbook runs well without a resident AV product.  :D

Oh, and eSet's AV Remover tool is a dead useful bit of kit :)

f0dder:
Anyone got an useful $.02 to chip in?-oblivion (April 11, 2015, 09:50 AM)
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First, don't bother with any product that includes a firewall. There's really no good reason to use anything but the built-in Windows stuff... unless you're one of those paranoid enterprisey corporations, and then you'd run fascist outgoing firewalls at your internet edge, not individual machines.

Second, I haven't seen any good reasons to use anything but MSE for anti-malware for several years. The 3rd-party offerings are bloated, resource-intensive, buggy (to the point of sometimes borking your system, like Panda recently did), and try to legitimize themselves through fear-mongering.

Just stick with MSE, keep MalwareBytes/whatever if you accidentally miss a double-negative checkbox for installing browser toolbars from shareware, and browse responsibly.

Use a decent ad-blocker (the really nice µblock is available for firefox now as well!), add in Ghostery, and do not use the Java and Flash plugins for your browser - if you need flash, use Chrome's built-in flash support, even if your primary browser is firefox.

EDIT: changed µblock link to gorhill "origin" instead of chrisaljoudi because of ongoing controversy.

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