What they call Behavioral Virus and spyware protection, I call proactive. Instead of being reactionary and delayed behind viruses and spyware, ThreatFire is able to analyze the behavioral habits of programs to determine if it is a virus before a definition (thumbprint identifying the virus) even exists. Chances are if it sounds like a virus and quacks like a virus, it’s probably a virus.
ThreatFire is a great complement to your current anti-virus software. The two services do not conflict and ThreatFire just sits on top, adding an extra layer of security by not being dependent upon definitions. This method allows ThreatFire to help protect against zero-day vulnerabilities that normal anti-virus can’t identify. It can protect against viruses, worms, trojans, spyware, rootkits, keyloggers, and buffer overflows.
The ThreatFire service and tray processes combined use less than 5 MB of RAM while in use. This utility is free for personal and individual use. It boasts to be able to detect more malware instances than with just an antivirus program installed. Upon detecting malware, ThreatFire can shutdown processes and quarantine malware to prevent it from doing any more harm.
A lot of anti-virus/anti-malware programs can be very intrusive for the end user, but I can gladly report that ThreatFire is not one of those. It largely just sits in the system tray scanning things in the background and hasn’t detected any false positives. After running it for about two weeks, I’ve only seen one window that popped up after an update occured and it reported the status of how many programs it has examined:
Along with the background scanning that ThreatFire provides, it also includes a cool tool that is very useful for sizing up your system and what running programs on your system are doing. The System Activity Monitor can tell you the path to the executable, the process ID, properties, network activity from the process, and recent file changes.
Download and learn more at the ThreatFire website. Unfortunately there is no 64-bit compatible version yet, but it is said to be in development.
If you’re looking for a base anti-virus as well, I recommend the also free for personal and individual use, Avast Home. I can vouch that Avast and ThreatFire work great together from my own experience.