Free new PC security suite forgets the anti-virus

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Tuesday, 24 October 2006 22:18

Your IT - Entertainment

Security software firm eEye Digital Security have launched Blink Personal Edition free of charge, a sophisticated firewall with intrusion prevention and more, yet forgot to include an inbuilt anti-virus package. Do Symantec, McAfee, Trend Micro, ZoneLabs or Microsoft have anything to worry about?

Just launched, Blink Personal Edition is an amazing sounding firewall and security package, and it comes at the great price of free for personal use – although as always, a paid-for professional version with more features is on sale.

Blink combines intrusion prevention, an application and network firewall, identity theft protection and vulnerability assessment in a single piece of software.

eEye claims their new firewall has excellent proactive properties, giving you both proactive and reactive protection against the broad methods of attack and compromise used by hackers to gain access to your system and personal data.

With ‘Zero-Day’ attacks becoming increasingly common, where hackers create websites and code to exploit vulnerabilities on the day they are announced, hoping to capture as many people as possible that haven’t yet patched their systems, Blink’s defences work to prevent this being a problem.

Blink claim to use a multi-layered, intelligent approach to protect against brand new attacks that take advantage of previously-unknown computer weaknesses, including new variations of existing attacks that may not yet be detected by antivirus signatures.

Using this technique, eEye say Blink was able to fend off widespread exploits like CodeRed and Sasser, even without the relevant security patches installed.

Other features including protection from Phishing emails and attemps at Identity Theft, a local vulnerability assessment tool, a neighbourhood watch program and more, accessible via a simple yet powerful interface that needs very little input from the main user, if any once it has all been set up.

What’s missing from this package is an anti-virus program. For a good free AV package, Grisoft’s AVG is still the best one out there, and the two packages can be used together.

With the all-in-one integrated ease of Internet Security Packages from all the major players, all of whom include anti-virus protection, anti-spware protection and more, eEye may make a small dent, but are unlikely to do any lasting damage to sales.

Microsoft’s single and 3 user license packs of OneCare Live will likely to that instead! In the meantime this is a very interesting sounding alternative to the free ZoneAlarm firewall.

That said, it’s easy to install Blink, Grisoft’s AVG and Microsoft’s Windows Defender (or another package from Spybot or AdAware) to get a great security suite that automatically updates itself without paying a cent.

The world of computer security keeps on changing in more ways than many can keep up! But for now, the news is good.