You can never be too careful about security and it has been a long time since a simple anti-virus program was enough. These days, a firewall is absolutely essential. This writer has personally had experience with Black Ice, Tiny Personal Firewall, Norton Firewall, Zone Alarm and now Comodo. I used Zone Alarm both when it was free and when it became a premium product. As for anti-virus programs, I have used most of the free ones, the new anti-virus from Zone Alarm that comes with the Zone Alarm Security Suite, Norton and Nod 32. I have always kept my firewall settings fairly high, I have checked most stuff that I have downloaded and I have run virus scans more frequently than most. Despite that, my PC has been infected, with at least one Trojan and a couple of viruses in the last six months.

About two weeks ago, I ran into serious PC problems. I deleted a suspicious program off my computer and then found that along with it, some system files went too. I restored what I could There were a few tense moments. My system rebooted to a black screen. I booted into safe mode, restored the registry, rebooted and things were working again, but my system was sluggish and something else felt wrong. Virus scans did not pick up anything, but I noticed that the problems occurred when I was multi-tasking, particularly with MS Word and Firefox. Firefox was down to a memory issues and while MS Word has had vulnerabilities in the past, I had always been extremely careful. Still, my PC security had already been breached. It was possible that there was another infection.

I changed my anti-virus program to Nod 32, and to do that I had to uninstall my security suite (Zone Alarm). Once I took off the security suite, my system started working quite a bit better. A scan revealed no infections. There was, however, no way that I was going to be spending any significant amount of time online without a firewall and I did not want to pay for a new one. I had heard about the Comodo Firewall and decided to give it a try. I got it set up and configured within days and things were more or less back to normal, but from time to time it got very sluggish. I noticed in the Comodo Firewall menu, there was an ad for an anti-malware solution. I am always looking for a good story, so I decided to give it a try. The program was called BOClean; I downloaded it, installed it and let it run in the background. I surfed around a little bit looking for a story, found something interesting, loaded MS Word and…

08/13/2007 16:34:55: MSSVR VARIANT STOPPED BY BOCLEAN!
Trojan horse was found in memory.
C:\PROGRAM FILES\MICROSOFT OFFICE\OFFICE11\WINWORD.EXE contained the trojan.
Active trojan horse WAS shut down. System safe.
Logged in user: xxx

I found my problem. BOClean’s solution was to delete the infected Winword executable. That was OK, I reinstalled my MS Office set and everything went back to normal function. I do not know how my system came to be penetrated; chances are it occurred during the time that I was using the Zone Alarm Suite. In all fairness, however, I did not have the On Demand Scanning option activated. It put too much of a strain on my system. BOClean functions the same way without causing the same amount of sluggishness, it uses about 14MB of RAM. The Comodo Firewall too has a very reasonable footprint running at just 2.2MB; Nod32 consumes about 4MB while it is running in the background, so my new suite requires just 20MB of RAM. Comodo have some great security software, the firewall is as good as any commercial software I have tried. It also has a great interface which makes it very easy to use. BOClean is something different entirely. It works in conjunction with an anti-virus, not instead of. It detects infected programs as they load, rather like an on-demand scanner. Except that the Trojan that I had been infected with had somehow manage to escape discovery by both of my scanners. BOClean picked it up and now has become an integral part of my security solution. As for my anti-virus, I will be sticking with Nod 32. The three programs function well together and as a makeshift security suite are second to none, that I have tried.

Comodo Firewall Price: FREE
Comodo Boclean Price: FREE
Eset Nod 32 Price: 1 Year for $39.00