ThreatFire AntiVirus Free Overview

Threat Fire was formerly known as Cyber Hawk, got his name under PC Tools. Threat Fire an ICSA and West Coast Labs certified product. Threat Fire is dramatically different to traditional antivirus software. Its not a Standalone AntiVirus in itself but a Complementary Catalyst to other antivirus software. But why do need such a software when you already have an antivirus ?? Existing antivirus software can detect a malacious program only if its data base has its signature. For this such programs first needs to have to be identified and antivirus should see it as a threat to the system. Accordingly a database of signatures is created. And then the software is able to detect and protect the system against such malacious programs by referring to the signatures of the malacious programs in the database. And what if such signatures are morphed ?? And this whole process creates a large void of time, where threats are undetected. Your system can be infected even when you have antivirus software installed. But Threat Fire constantly protects your PC against attacks by detecting suspicious Behavior of the malacious programs instead of only looking for known threats like normal antivirus software.

Threat Fire is not a substitute for a signature-based antivirus scanner. Threat Fire won’t detect a dormant threat its sole focus is on activity. And if the system is already infected, Threat Fire will quarantine only the active components leaving portions of the malware behind.

Threat Fire’s ActiveDefense automatically quarantines known bad apps and generates alerts for those deemed suspicious. Threat Fire’s ActiveDefense Technology has proven to provide up to 243% more protection when combined with traditional AntiVirus products.
 

Main Features

• Anti Rootkit.
• Anti Spyware.
• Anti Phishing.
• IntelliGuard.
• Heuristic Scanning.
• Realtime Scanning.
• Identity protection
• Firewall protection.
• Antivirus protection.
• Behavior-based protection.
• Proactive Defense against Both Known and Unknown Threats.
• Out-of-the-box protection pre-configured for optimum protection.
• Well designed and intuitive interface suitable for novice and experts alike.
• More Technical Details Provided on Alerts.
• Technical Support.

 
Threat Fire’s interface presents a minimum amount of buttons to control the application. The menu offers options that allow for the configuration and scanning of files and folders allowing the user to manually scan on a regular basis. Memory requirements are average for this application. The virus database appears comprehensive. As in every antivirus software, Threat Fire too has automatic update capability. It’s trademarked IntelliGuard protects your computer against threats in real-time. The additional settings in this software enables to add networks to a Trusted Zone or a custom defined port list and customization allows to define custom ports for email servers and clients that use ports outside of the normal range.
 

What’s New

• Behavior profiling.
• In-the-cloud techniques.
• Neural Network Technology that provides geater accuracy in detection.
• Tracker Technology for improved threat quarantine and clean-up.
• Enhanced Malaware Detection.
• Enhanced RootKit Detection.
• Focus on pure behavioral protection.
• Additional update options.
• Increased language support.

On The Lower Side

The major setback with Threat Fire is that it is designed to be used with other antivirus software. It’s not an antivrus software on its own, it works as a patch or addon. It detects only programs that attempt to run. So you still need a standard antivirus program to perform regular scans before the culprits gets a chance to execute. There are certain types of malacious programs that just cannot be caught by Threat Fire behavior-based system. Some threats lie dormant for days. Threat Fire cannot catch such programs until they take action.

Our Experience

The installation was satisfactory. The menu was relatively easy to navigate and offered additional settings for each of the areas of protection. Threat Fire was not able to detect viruses in zipped format. But this is not a major issue. Its detection was okay. Threat Fire also failed to block commercial keyloggers that used rootkit technology. Threat Fire’s removal was annoying. Threat Fire cannot be removed from start up routine with out uninstalling it. Threat Fire scored 4/12 on our scoring parameters.