What is Your Opinion of ThreatFire

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April 20th, 2008, 09:56 PM
Doc

What is Your Opinion of ThreatFire

I downloaded and installed [url=www.threatfire.com]ThreatFire. While they call it an antivirus, it is more like a supplement to what you have as it monitors your computer for suspicious behavior. This is good as most antivirus programs are only as good as their latest definitions.

I am running the latest Kaspersky Internet Security and decided to see what happens with ThreatFire installed. My experience was that the program inserts itself into every program you program (my guess is so as to monitor what the correct behavior is supposed to be). Every time I started a program though I would get a warning from KIS that a suspicious activity was going on. I also noticed a slow down in my computer (not counting all of the time I used dealing with the warnings from KIS).

After less than one day I uninstalled ThreatFire as I felt that this program was too intrusive. I also felt that KIS was doing a good job as it did note the intrusions from ThreatFire.

So what are your thoughts on this program?

Doc
April 20th, 2008, 11:25 PM
Broni

I've been using ThreatFire for quiet a while, along with AVG AV, and Comodo firewall, and I haven't noticed any problems.
I recommended it to number of people, and I didn't hear any complains.
And, yes, it's not an antivirus. It's more of an antimalware program.
April 20th, 2008, 11:41 PM
HAN

Yes, they do call it an AV but it is absolutely not one. Give credit for that decision to the PC Tools marketing dept... :(

Anyway, as Doc notes, ThreatFire (formerly CyberHawk) is a behavior monitor program. It has both a blacklist and a whitelist of programs that are known to be bad and good. Beyond the lists, TF analyzes what is going on. Things like changes to the OS, new drivers for hardware and connections to the network. So yes, it does keep an eye on several things.

After reading of Doc's experience and having ran TF for several months, as soon as I read "KIS", I expected a negative report. For reasons not known to me, Kaspersky appears to have lowered their program's ability to work with other anti-malware to nearly zero. It's my opinion that if you run KAV or KIS 7, don't try to run any other anti-malware in real-time. The chances of you having "issues" seem to be higher than you might expect.

I have TF on my 2 PCs at home and 2 PCs at work. In all 4 cases, I've had no issues with slowdowns at all. In fact, TF replaced Comodo's BOClean on all of these PCs and the change actually brought noticeable performance improvements.
May 1st, 2008, 09:28 AM
TrueGreen

I would agree with Han on KIS and Threatfire. Threatfire really messed things up for me. KIS alone, and probably other Internet Security Suites are probably all you need to protect your computer. That seems to be the trend.
May 3rd, 2008, 05:21 PM
TrueGreen

Read this thread re: Threatfire: http://discussions.virtualdr.com/sho...d.php?t=230166
See last post by Broni.
May 4th, 2008, 04:50 AM
104456

It seems to be causing a few post install issues by blocking antivirus installs going by recent posts.So if yiou find you cant install an application Id suggest removing the Threatfire first then trying again.
May 4th, 2008, 09:48 AM
HAN

An alternative that should work (I haven't installed a new AV since having TF on board) would be to temporarily shut down TF. Ctrl+right click the TF tray icon and click Exit. Then, go to a command prompt and type net stop Threatfire. That will shut it down until the next boot...
May 4th, 2008, 12:32 PM
Broni

Quote:

go to a command prompt and type net stop Threatfire

This is a good thought.
When I was having problem with installing AVG/Avast, I tried to "suspend" TF from systray (there is no "exit" option), but it didn't help. I didn't think about stopping its service. I just uninstalled it.
BTW, I emailed PCTools about my problems. We'll see what their response will be.
May 4th, 2008, 01:51 PM
104456

Seems they have a sticky reagrding threatfire and AVG8 though it only seems to cover the updating of AVG it still doesnt look good for early versions given it was posted in March.
http://www.pctools.com/forum/showthread.php?t=51504

Quote:

The following is a bug we are noticing with our update installer and it's compatibility with AVG8. If you have AVG8 installed on your system, and you are prepared to update from ThreatFire 3.0.14.16, you MUST add a file exception to AVG8. If not, you will experience critical system failure including, but not limited to, applications not loading, programs becoming unresponsive, and in worst cases, systems will fail to load and operate beyond the basic desktop.

...............................

Also, this can be circumvented if you uninstall ThreatFire 3.0.14.16 completely, and then download the complete edition (non-upgrade/update) of ThreatFire from our sites.

ATTN: IF YOU HAVE THIS ISSUE, BOOT TO SAFE MODE AND UNINSTALL THREATFIRE.
You can get into safe mode by pressing F8 after your POST screen and before Windows boots up.

Once this is finished, you can now update to ThreatFire 3.5.0.21 from installer downloaded off our website
June 30th, 2008, 04:26 AM
Branston

Threatfire 3.5 and AVG 8 Free

I too have been experiencing problems with Threatfire 3.5 and have temporarily uninstalled it. I'm running Windows XP Pro SP2 with AVG8. Threatfire worked well on day one, but upon reboot the next day, the system hung and even after 30 minutes had failed to start. MS Excel 2003 wouldn't open along with other programs. Task manager failed to stop the Threatfire program and the system was unusable. I was able to boot in safe mode and uninstall Threatfire. Having read the post above, about creating exceptions in AVG8 I'll try that as I believe the program has a lot of merits. I bought a similar program called "Blink" a while back from Eeye. It works in a similar manner but cost $25/yr.

Thanks for a very useful forum.