Threatfire: Lying or bad PR?

[eyeb]

been looking into adding threatfire to be used with avira but I saw this on the main page

and it seems to scream too good to be true lol, how can you even get past 100% protection? It's going to protect my next infection also before it even happens?

Can anyone tell me their experience on it? I've only found dubious reviews on google for it and a lot seem to be outdated too

[bo.elam]

eyeb try it on Time freeze. I am thinking about doing so. I believe Threatfire
does not need to reboot after installing so it should be OK to try it using
Time freeze.

Bo

[Ritho]

The percentages in the chart are not claiming total protection rates, it is showing the amount of claimed extra protection. (For example: If I send you $50, then MC sends you $50 he sent you 100% of what I did. But if Bo then sends you $100 dollars he sent you 200% more than I did. If Avira blocks 25 viruses out of 100 (25%), and then Avast, blocks 50, it blocked 200% more while at the same time blocking only 50% of the total) I sure hope my math is right here!!

HIPS and other behavioral blockers can be considered to provide many times better protection that any antivirus that is purely signature based when it comes to unknowns / zero day threats.

The small print under their chart is the key.

Chart shows the amount of extra protection that ThreatFire provides when detecting, blocking and removing zero-day and unknown threats from your system as shown in an independent test conducted by AV-test.org in June 2009.

Their ploy is to make you think it will give you all around better protection than those other products, but in reality the chart only shows unknown detection rates according to the AV-test trials.

By the way this is not meant as a defense of Threatfire. I have never used it, and know very little about it. This is just meant to point out the "politics" at work here. By the way, be careful in real politics when you see a percentage. (e.g. If unemployment or unemployment rates go up or down 200% it might not mean much. You need to know the actual numbers. If 5 people out of a million loose their jobs on month, then the next month 10 more loose their jobs, the unemployment rate went up 200% over the previous month. Which sounds a lot worse than .0005% of the people lost their jobs the first month and .0010% of the people lost their jobs the second. Politicians know how to make "facts" work in their favor even if they don't amount to much, and so do software companies.

[eyeb]

so it's bad pr for misleading :S lol... thanks this was kind of what I wanted to know. I guess I'm not going to use it, I tried it with time freeze like bo suggested and I havent notice any changes even if it's only been a day of use. But that 1 day use convinced me the 0 day risk is near 0 so not worth it imo

[MidnightCowboy]

Originally Posted by eyeb

so it's bad pr for misleading :S lol... thanks this was kind of what I wanted to know. I guess I'm not going to use it, I tried it with time freeze like bo suggested and I havent notice any changes even if it's only been a day of use. But that 1 day use convinced me the 0 day risk is near 0 so not worth it imo

I would suggest this is the best policy based on your own need/risk assessment.

These charts are just marketing hype. Prevx used a similar strategy on their own site a while back.

Anyone would be lucky to get 50c out of me by the way

[mrpink]

Quote:
Chart shows the amount of extra protection that ThreatFire provides when detecting, blocking and removing zero-day and unknown threats from your system as shown in an independent test conducted by AV-test.org in June 2009.


They should add a chart that shows the amount of extra slowdown that TF provides. I bet with Avira on your system would be around 1000%

I do know one thing, and that is that Threatfire development has apparently ended, or at least slowed way down. There hasn't been a new build released since November of last year, according to their website. I imagine that it has everything to do with Symantec taking over and shuffling them around. Maybe cutting back the development team, or even discontinuing development altogether. They've discontinued a few of their products already, including their popular firewall.

[Doobie]

Originally Posted by eyeb

and it seems to scream too good to be true lol, how can you even get past 100% protection?

Good antivirus programs should destroy viruses before they get to the computer.