ThreatFire and Combat Arms
Usually I end up relying purely on Avast! or AVG as a virus scanner, but recently I’ve been giving ThreatFire a try. ThreatFire is a lightweight free security solution designed to work alongside regular antivirus software. Unlike most virus / malware / rootkit scanners ThreatFire doesn’t just check a signature database to find malicious programs; instead it watches what processes are doing. As a result it notifies you if that program you just downloaded is trying to change IE settings, if something just deleted itself, or if that exe extractor is installing a Trojan while it works. This last situation happened to me and ClamWin (my current antivirus, though I’ve found Avast! better) didn’t notice.
For the low price of free ThreatFire uses only 2 MB of memory to protect your Windows computer from viruses and malware that may not even appear on you virus scanner’s database - while it doesn’t replace the traditional scanner it is an excellent addition. It received a 4.5 on PC Magazine and appeared on their list of 11 Critical Security Security Apps. False positives are low and successful identifications are high, making it an easy choice to install. While my own testing has been much more limited than PC Mag’s I’ve still found it to be successful and it’s on my list of must-install applications, which can be seen here.
Aside from testing ThreatFire I’ve been trying a game called Combat Arms. It’s another free-to-play Nexon title, meaning you’re sure to see people who’ve paid for customization; however no gameplay-modifying items are cash payment only, so at least there’s no trouble there. While the game seems to have a lot more camping than I’ve seen in CS:S I’d still say to give it a shot, especially if you have some friends with mics (though you’ll need Skype or another VOIP client). At time of writing I’m still only at Private rank but I’m slowly working my way up. I’ve also written a scraper script that can get info from the Nexon profile pages - I’m planning on making it store info in a database and generate graphs, of KDR statistics for example.
