Hangtooth's Config

[Hangtooth]

Removed: GRC DNSBenchmark
Added: DNSJumper

DNSJumper is by no means as thorough in testing DNS servers, but they give me pretty much the same recommendations anyway and it's easier to use (one click storage of current DNS servers and 1 click change to new tested DNS servers). Changed both my DNS servers OPENDNS.

Now, if I could just find a tool to test IPv6 DNS servers. I am sure it exists and I'll find it soon.

Screw it, I'll just try the OpenDNS ones =) IPv6 | OpenDNS

 

[AtlBo]

Thanks for the reply. You are right about NoScript. It is a beast to use really. I mean I can blanket approve individual sites, but then that's everything coming through. I also added Ghostery, which I wholeheartedly recommend. With Ghostery added to NoScript, you can approve your "safe sites" in NoScript and then Ghostery will catch all the ad silliness and junk normally NS would block, too, while leaving your video to play. This works good for me. It still takes some time to get used to. It's like, "how did the video get through?" It works though. By the way, for site recommendations (blacklisting), I recommend taking a look at Bluhell Firewall for Firefox (on the subject of Firefox add ons). It's another Firefox add on that seems really trustworthy. Most of the a-vs have this feature, but the blacklisting is Bluhell's claim to fame, so to speak. I guess it's kind of like WOT in a way, but I have enjoyed having it for the times when I click links faster than I think.

With MBAE, there is a notice on the program window that says how many exploits have been blocked, but that number hasn't changed for me. I love the potential for blocking exploits in Office and in all the various browsers, so I keep it around on that one PC as a reminder that I would like to have something like that. I tried to research the pay version several months ago but didn't get very far.

HMPA sounds really great. I'll probably be sticking with what I have for now, but I like the sound of that. It's kind of like having an anti-keylogger, the peace of mind element. I have Private Firewall and 360 Total Security which both target keylogging (360 TS is pretty good about this!). So for anti-scripting I go with NoScript and Ghostery, and that's my internet peace of mind.

I really do agree with you about Glasswire. I mean, it's more than just a pretty package with all of that information. If you are suspicious about something from another a-v, you can go straight into GW and see if that process or program has been accessing the net...and how much data and even when too. Not being a real firewall as you say, I think it's a stone's throw from being a real serious tool as a straight internet connection control mechanism. Maybe if it were just a couple of layers deeper with regards to control it would be great.

Anyway, thanks for the input and your informative posts. I was looking for info on Comodo Firewall, but I found alot in your thread here on alot of security subjects. It's cool to run across someone with a broad diversity of experience with the programs...

 

[Hangtooth]

Kind words but I am really a generalist, always been my problem =)

I love BluHell firewall, but it immediately broke most of the streaming sites for my wife so she demanded it be taken off. Again if it was just me, I'd be running BluHell on Firefox happily. It's really light and effective. It just doesn't seem as quick to change as uBlock origin and the other ublock fork, or even adblock plus. If BluHell breaks something, I figured it'd stay broken for a long time, hopefully I am wrong but she's impatient enough I got rid of it after a day.

I love the Malwarebytes company, I even bought a few lifetime licenses for MBAM but it seems they might just be slacking a little with MBAM. I couldn't tell if it was the same with MBAE free but when I look at the features of HMPA vs MBAE paid, MBAE paid really seemed to be lacking. Maybe MBAE is all about quality of protection instead of quantity, but then again HMPA seems to offer both. The only bad things I have heard about HMPA around here are it can be kind of buggy sometimes as it's always changing and doesn't have time to mature.

Glasswire is indeed neat, it makes looking at your network data interesting and easy to do, that's a definite plus. Worth the resource cost for me as I learned some neat new things today from it alone. Interactive toys are the best!

I hear great things about Comodo products here, especially the firewall, again the only downside being they can be a little buggy at times. They just offer so much and have so many irons in the fire I can see why things slip through the cracks. I used Comodo years ago and liked it, and it's super customizable, I just didn't really feel like delving into it when so many other alternatives work 'pretty well' (thinking of windows firewall) right out of the box.

I think there's some extremely knowledgable people here who could give you great pointers on setting Comodo up to meet whatever your needs are. They love that firewall and seem to know it inside and out =)

 

[AtlBo]

Yeah, I ran across cruelsister's posts and videos . She's off the deep end with CF, which is great. I learned alot from her threads. When I get a chance I will get into it deeper.

My problem is that I feel like I have to know EXACTLY what a security program is doing before I 100% feel comfortable committing to the program. My brief looks at CF over the years have been positive but there is so much "happening in the dark" with the program. I have some scripts, and I had a hard time keeping CF from deleting them. It was frustrating, and it's been holding me back. Anyway, at least I have Private Firewall and Glasswire. I am getting by with those, until I can get in the main stream of thinking with Comodo.

Thanks for the info on HMPA and the rest. Not surprised HMP came up with a solid competitor for MBAE...

 

[Hangtooth]

Added: Avira Browser Safety Addon to Firefox and Chrome - free addon/extension that lost the web protection component (that I have anyway as a paid Avira Pro user) that seems okay if you (a) turn off the shopping portion which attempts to interfere with your shopping and show you better deals ~ and (b) turn off the safety indicator that otherwise pesters you at the top middle of your browser window. If the site's safe, i don't need to see it, and if the site's not safe, I have a giant screen filled webpage telling me it is not courtesy of Avira.

With the two settings off it doesn't seem to slow browsing down at all, and I have only seen one page marked dangerous in a google search and when I clicked on it anyway, it blocked it.

The tool is more for my wife's machine than mine as she's a happy clicker but to be fair about things, I am testing it on mine to see if it will interfere with things/slow things down. So far so good. Was never a fan of WOT.

Here's a youtube review of Avira Browser Safety that I found:

Added: Crystal Reports free just to do second opinion scans.

 

[Hangtooth]

Removed: Glasswire - it was fun but wasn't doing much for the resources consumed.

Removed: Driver Talent - was great until it decided it didn't like one of the drivers on my second machine, driver talent tried to 'repair it' hung the machine, broke the working driver and forced me to restore from a restore point. Goodbye, Driver Talent.

Added: Secunia PSI on discussions here and this review of software updaters: The Best Tools To Check For Software Updates

 

[Hangtooth]

Added: Firefox 64 bit - didn't realize it came out Dec 15th at last Mozilla's Firefox finally enters the 64-bit era on Windows

 

[Hangtooth]

Removed: Avira Antivirus Pro - disabling self-protection modules to enable updating is NOT an acceptable bugfix for a year
Removed: Avira Browser Safety

Installed: Sophos Home - pretty much on the basis of this video review:



EDIT: Removed: cFosSpeed internet traffic shaper, it got absolutely thrashed by whatever the hell Sophos home is doing - it was using 25% CPU nonstop as it tried to handle all the Sophos Home internet traffic

EDIT2: cFosSpeed new beta version had a bug where it alone was using 25% of cpu, it was cfosspeed not sophos - reverted to latest stable cfosspeed version

 

[Hangtooth]

Removed: Sophos Home - all control is through the web interface, I couldn't even delete a 'threat' it found manually. I had to do so through the web interface and it didn't delete it. Great idea if this was running on my grandmother's machine for remote assistance, but a little heavy-handed for me. Not really what I am looking for in an AV. Four false positives on the first scan that it couldn't even remove when I allowed it to. It wouldn't let me delete them manually either ~

Added: Kaspersky Internet Security 30 day trial - first impressions not so good. It hung the system on install and I had to reset. Now it's taking a very long time to slowly download the first batch of updates... 15 minutes for 15 megabytes. mmm.. Hoping I can change the default update server once it's actually finished updating on install.

 

[Hangtooth]

Removed: Kaspersky IS trial - I probably would give it more time but Sophos + Kaspersky trials in 1 day have given me a migraine.
Added: Windows Defender for now as I am disgusted with the AV business atm

I feel like Goldilocks of the AV world. This AV has too many FPs (Webroot), this AV can't be updated unless I turn off self-protection (Avira), this AV doesn't leave me much control (Sophos home), this AV wants to rule my computer and world with an iron fist (Kaspersky), this AV makes my wife's machine hang on reboot (Eset).

So far my favourite is Avira, but they have left some users hanging for 10-12 months with an update problem where their fix is - just turn off Avira's self-protection modules and you can update fine ~ I really don't know if I want to reinstall it, but am too tired to look at alternatives atm.

 

[Hangtooth]

Installed: Avira Pro - I give up, self-protection modules be damned. least the rest works nicely.

 

[Hangtooth]

Decided to shake things up and try for a cheap and cheerful light on resources build since I rebuilt both machines anyway.

Added: Sophos Home (giving this another shot as my primary AV)
Added: MBAE Free
Removed: Avira Pro, HMPA trial

Trying to decide on what to go with Sophos if I give it a real try. I threw MBAE Free on to have *something* to fall back on for now.

 

[Hangtooth]

Added: SecurAplus (with no optional offline AV)

I want to see how their Virustotal scanned whitelist blocking works. Hopefully it plays nice w/ Sophos. and MBAE Free

 

[Cats-4_Owners-2]

What a fun ride! (save for your migraines earlier).
Reading your experience with Kasperski aloud from this laptop as my wife sat down beside me she'd then exclaimed "Kasperski?? ..that was the worst one!".
I know it's loved by many, but when the Lady of The House is unhappy... well.
Yes, I know I'm preaching to the choir!

Thank you for sharing your exploits, Hangtooth. They are ever fascinating to read, and your system(s) are presently nicely armored (hopefully) with no more migraines!

 

[Hangtooth]

Ah the fun never ends =) I *think* mucked around too hard with Revo Uninstaller Pro and just noticed I had fouled my network and firewall registry entries. Either that or something else ate my registry... At this point it was easier to start fresh again!

Removed: SecurePlusA - hey, it's probably not your fault everything got hosed, but you were there!
Removed: Revo Uninstaller Pro

Added: Geek Uninstaller Free

*new mantra, don't let anything touch the registry 'cept Geek or Ccleaner!

PS I think EEK/Emsi is having problems with their update servers. I blame them too.. I thought I broke something when EEK wouldn't update and I mucked around! Their support forums are full of 'I can't update' messages now.

About to downgrade my knowledge/expertise to 'basic' lol.

 

[Deleted member 178]

About to downgrade my knowledge/expertise to 'basic' lol.

better be a basic "qualified" user than an "advanced "out-of-clues" one

 

[Hangtooth]

Ok, fresh new experiment. Before things get too far out of hand I am reinstalling on both machines and NOT going to use any registry cleaners (even Ccleaner) and see how it goes.

Realtime protection: Sophos Home + MBAE Free + Crystal Security
Second opinion: EEK + MBAM Premium + ZAM beta + HMP

Removed: cFosSpeed (possibly to blame for networking woes), SecurAPlus (defender wouldn't auto disable with Sophos anymore after removing it, so replaced with crystal security)

Both machines reinstalled fresh, all drivers working, all windows updates done, and imaged and verified with Macrium Reflect.

The only touchy thing is making Crystal Security begin with Windows but I saw a nice post pointing to a tutorial for doing so with Task Scheduler. That's this morning's project.

It's kind of nice having it so easy to fresh reinstall so quickly with USB. Takes maybe 20 minutes. This could be habit forming and lead me to try Sandboxie or Shadow Defender. I just don't think either of those would be very wife-friendly which is my real concern in picking security options. They have to be smart enough to run basically unattended and let her actually download and save things easily.

 

[Hangtooth]

Moved from real-time to on demand: Crystal Security - really like it, but doesn't seem very secure as it tends to crash due to its own actions - I'd hate to see it under attack

Added to real-time: SecuraAPlus Beta 4.13 with offline AV engine disabled - liked what I saw in the release version, wanted to see where it is heading and if any weirdness recurs

 

[Hangtooth]

Removed: SecureAPlus beta - not feeling the love for this one atm
Removed: MBAE - always had respect for MBAM, but I really can't tell if MBAE does anything
Added: HMPA - hey, if Sophos bought them, running Sophos + HMPA should be a naturally winning combo ~

 

[Cats-4_Owners-2]

Ok, fresh new experiment. Before things get too far out of hand I am reinstalling on both machines and NOT going to use any registry cleaners (even Ccleaner) and see how it goes.

Realtime protection: Sophos Home + MBAE Free + Crystal Security
Second opinion: EEK + MBAM Premium + ZAM beta + HMP

Removed: cFosSpeed (possibly to blame for networking woes), SecurAPlus (defender wouldn't auto disable with Sophos anymore after removing it, so replaced with crystal security)

Both machines reinstalled fresh, all drivers working, all windows updates done, and imaged and verified with Macrium Reflect.

The only touchy thing is making Crystal Security begin with Windows but I saw a nice post pointing to a tutorial for doing so with Task Scheduler. That's this morning's project.

It's kind of nice having it so easy to fresh reinstall so quickly with USB. Takes maybe 20 minutes. This could be habit forming and lead me to try Sandboxie or Shadow Defender. I just don't think either of those would be very wife-friendly which is my real concern in picking security options. They have to be smart enough to run basically unattended and let her actually download and save things easily.

I believe I've taken the classes "No longer using registry cleaners (even CCleaner).."-101 in the form of threads and many foreboding posts of warning!
Surprisingly, my wife happily opens Firefox with Sandboxie every time! She'd put up with NoScript for over a year before releasing it to be un-installed (by me) so she's 'safe clicking about'. I'm very proud!
If you find you are using Shadow Defender, a USB Flash Drive (not placed into Shadow Mode) may be used for downloads that would otherwise "disappear". I've browsed with a portable browser on the Flash Drive in Sandboxie (overkill I know) and recover the file on the external beside the browser.
Lots of activity with headaches kept to a minimum, right? Definitely good experiences, and positive choices!