Regardless of whether or not you are extremely protective with your system or are just a casual user, it is a good idea to keep tabs of what is running on your system. The reason being is simple, if suspicious activity occurs you will know. Rather than being your own system watchdog, take a look at WinPatrol.
A terse description from WinPatrol’s web site:
WinPatrol uses a heuristic behavioral approach to detecting attacks and violations of your computing environment. Traditional security programs scan your hard drive searching for previously identified threats. WinPatrol takes snapshot of your critical system resources and alerts you to any changes that may occur without your knowledge. You’ll be removing dangerous new programs while others prepare to update their definition/signature data files.
In plain English, this means WinPatrol monitors for suspicious behavior instead of scanning only for ‘known’ threats. Realistically, this approach is better than traditional file scanner utilities because it detects and alerts you what a peice of malware is doing, regardless of whether or not the actual program causing the problem is a known threat.
Either way, this is a great utility to have. It’s free and lightweight, so you can’t beat that.
Jason Faulkner is the man who brings you our daily tips. He is based in Atlanta, Georgia.
John said:
9/16/2008 10:57 pm
I have heard of this. Most Anti virus packs that are good should come with this and just by not having it tells you how good the product is.
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Sharron (kkomp) reply on September 16, 2008 11:55 pm:
As a matter of fact many antivirus solutions, as well as a few anti-malware products, do run a heuristic analysis in tandem with a scan for known threats to some extent; although how their analysis compares with this product I can’t say; as such analyses would vary depending on the antiviral program running. On some of these antivirus programs it is possible to decide to switch heuristic analysis on or off.
This program would appear to be a useful supplement to these, relying possibly on an in-depth heuristic analysis of unusual changes and/or known behaviours of malware components. As such, in my opinion, it should be used as a complimentary partner to any such defensive applications rather than as a substitute for them - On the proviso that a conflict does not occur between it and such a program of course.
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