Thread: PC Tools Threatfire

PC Tools is not a stand-alone antivirus program. It supplements your existing security with effective behavioral analysis that can stop malware based on what the file tries to do on your PC.

Other programs employ behavioral or heuristic techniques, too (the latter looks for partial matches with known malware). But behavioral detection like the approach that PC Tools has implemented here can be particularly tricky, as it's prone to accidentally flagging harmless software .

In AV-Test.org's behavioral-detection tests, most apps have only about a 30 percent to 60 percent detection rate. Not so for Threatfire: It warned about all 15 of the malware samples used, and it blocked all but one of them. What's more, it didn't put up any false-positive warnings.

Threatfire defaults to a good level of sensitivity, but we suggest turning on the option in Settings "Quarantine to create a system restore point automatically before quarantining anything. As for extras, an activity monitor provides details about running programs, and a mostly just-for-show threat monitor maps global outbreaks.

Though Threatfire is made to run with other apps, and we had no problems in our tests, it has conflicted with AVG in the past. That aside, we recommend Threatfire as a strong extra layer of defense.

good collection