Here's a post from Dan a couple of days ago @ CO. It may be helpful to anyone new to, or unfamiliar with, VoodooShield:
Quote from: Shmu26 on May 24, 2019, 09:46:42 am
Thanks to all who replied to my question about Smart mode and toggling.
Dan, I understand that you recommend Smart mode, so maybe you could spell out the advantages of the toggle approach, as opposed to the always-on approach? It sounds like most users, including myself, can't see the practical difference.
"Hey, a new thread! Sure, when VS toggles to OFF, it automatically builds the tiny, customized whitelist for the user. VS also toggles to OFF after 10 minutes of user inactivity. If you were to reset your whitelist and put VS in Smart Mode, you would probably be surprised how many items are automatically added to the whitelist that would normally be blocked by traditional application whitelisting. After a few days it probably does not make that big of a difference, especially if you are like 95%+ users who hardly ever install new software.
The whole goal of VS is to reduce the frequency of unwanted and unnecessary user prompts as much as possible, and to automatically build the tiny, customized whitelist for the end user, and to keep the whitelist as small as possible.
Besides toggling, the other option would be to scan and whitelist the entire hard drive after initially installing VS. This is okay, but obviously a whitelist that only contains 200-500 items is probably going to be more secure than a whitelist that contains tens of thousands of items.
But most importantly, the toggling provides VS the ability to create the most secure and robust lock possible, without significantly increasing the frequency of unnecessary user prompts. This is what I refer to as dynamic security postures, and it is the toggling that provides dynamic security postures.
For example... take your favorite traditional or next-gen security software. How cool would it be if the baseline protection was in place full time, then when the user is engaging in risky activities (browsing the web, checking email, etc.), your favorite security software dynamically switches to a heightened security posture? Security products have come a very long way the last few years, and there are some amazing products on the market, but it is extremely difficult for them to detect all malware AND have zero false positives if they only offer one static security posture full time.
Changing security postures on the fly is really what VS is all about."