davidh
February 7th, 2010, 01:33 AM
Today I did a "rollback" to a windows xp "system restore point" on one of our PC's. Unfortunately it blew out Zone Alarm free to the point where double uninstall and reinstall of ZA left ZA still dead. (Had to uninstall and reinstall Noscript too because of rollback.)
I sure did not want to rely solely on Windows firewall. Having to give permission on outbound connections to Internet helped me to notice that a couple PC's had been infected (by apps that I did not recognize as "normal"). Signature based malware detection is becoming less and less useful. Symantec (now owner of PCTOOLS) now uses whitelisting, cloud based, behavior based, etc. detection and still there are limits to "coverage". Internet is now more like gambling unless you only go to the same sites all the time.
Having had some slight experience with PCTOOLS Firewall free tried it again. Not bad. Didn't ask me to allow a whole lot of apps. Seems it knows about a lot of popular apps.
But it did ask me to allow some cases of where one app ran another app. e.g. when "drop my rights" ran Firefox for me.
I'm guessing that the pay for registered version of ZA might be a little more user friendly, but I've never actually tried it.
With all the malware , drive-by DL's, bugginess of browsers and their plugins, esp. Flash and Acrobat, etc., I'm getting bummed out.
XP will be unsupported in 2014. If I'm still kicking then I may have to make a dual boot system with LINUX just to keep from having a stroke. OTOH LINUX may give me one?
BTW the rollback was necessitated by apparent sw incompatibility, not malware. The malware infection(s) mentioned are UNRELATED to this issue with "system restore" "rollback" "XP" "ZA" and "PCTOOLS firewall".
Nevertheless, I would guess that making strategic "restore points" and then doing "rollbacks" in cases of hard to fix infections might be preferable sometimes to bare metal format and total reinstall (ugh).
I sure did not want to rely solely on Windows firewall. Having to give permission on outbound connections to Internet helped me to notice that a couple PC's had been infected (by apps that I did not recognize as "normal"). Signature based malware detection is becoming less and less useful. Symantec (now owner of PCTOOLS) now uses whitelisting, cloud based, behavior based, etc. detection and still there are limits to "coverage". Internet is now more like gambling unless you only go to the same sites all the time.
Having had some slight experience with PCTOOLS Firewall free tried it again. Not bad. Didn't ask me to allow a whole lot of apps. Seems it knows about a lot of popular apps.
But it did ask me to allow some cases of where one app ran another app. e.g. when "drop my rights" ran Firefox for me.
I'm guessing that the pay for registered version of ZA might be a little more user friendly, but I've never actually tried it.
With all the malware , drive-by DL's, bugginess of browsers and their plugins, esp. Flash and Acrobat, etc., I'm getting bummed out.
XP will be unsupported in 2014. If I'm still kicking then I may have to make a dual boot system with LINUX just to keep from having a stroke. OTOH LINUX may give me one?
BTW the rollback was necessitated by apparent sw incompatibility, not malware. The malware infection(s) mentioned are UNRELATED to this issue with "system restore" "rollback" "XP" "ZA" and "PCTOOLS firewall".
Nevertheless, I would guess that making strategic "restore points" and then doing "rollbacks" in cases of hard to fix infections might be preferable sometimes to bare metal format and total reinstall (ugh).