Online Armor

[Dieselman]

I love this free firewall. It comes in 2 flavors. Free and paid. The free version is mainly lacking keylogger protection but still scores in the top 10 at Matousec with a 86% score. Its easier to configure then Comdoo and has less pop ups. Set up is a breeze. Try it yourself. Anyone else using it? BTW OA (Online Armor) also has HIPS.

http://www.tallemu.com/

[Dieselman]

Online Armor also has a "run safer" mode which is added protection for programs such as web browsers and P2P.

Run Safer

When Windows is first installed, the first account it creates is an Administrator account, which is what most people use. The name of this account is usually the name of the person that owns the computer, and a person would need to know where to look to know if the account is an Administrator account or not.

Administrators are allowed by Windows to make nearly any change to the system that they want to, including changes that could affect the whole system. Administrators can install drivers, make configuration changes to Windows, and much more.

Limited users can not make changes that would affect the whole system. They cannot install software that could affect the system as a whole, cannot install drivers, and cannot configure Windows in any way that would affect other users on the system. For example, a Limited user can change the wallpaper and screensaver of their account, but cannot change the system time. The wallpaper and screensaver would only be seen when logging into that account, but a change to the system time would affect Windows as a whole (including other accounts on the system).

When you run a program, it will run with the permissions of the account. When you run your web browser in an administrative account, the web browser can do anything that the Administrator can do. Likewise, when you run your web browser in a Limited user account it can only do what Limited users are allowed to do. Limited user accounts offer strong protection, but are rarely used by the majority of computer users.

How does Run Safer work?

Run Safer makes using an Administrator account safer by running user-selected programs as a Limited user when you are in an Administrator account. Run Safer does not restrict programs directly, but rather tells Windows to impose the extra security measures of a Limited user on the target program.

When a program is running using Run Safer, any other program that is launched by this program will also “inherit” the Limited user account restrictions. This means that if your web browser is set to Run Safer and you browse to a website that uses some trick to infect your computer with malware through the web browser, then the malware will be heavily restricted in the ways that it could infect your system. This also means that when your browser is run using Run Safer and a document viewer or media player is automatically launched to view content from the internet, then that program also inherits the same protection; if the document viewer or media player ends up being used to infect your computer then the same security restrictions will be applied.

Some malware cannot infect a computer with the restrictions of a Limited user account at all.

[Senexx]

I like the concept of "run safer". It is just a shame about the "user selected" part and that it can't have an autoconfig of run all as limited user with say a deselect option. I understand the necessity for the user selected part though.

This firewall just might grow on me.

[Senexx]

This has cropped up a number of times on the forums, I'm into the free stuff and thus I'm giving it a whirl.

Had a bit of a struggle on the install but I'm guessing I had a prog opened that I shouldn't have.

Had it operational about 3 hours now and its working great so far.

Someone somewhere else commented on boot time and shut down remarkably slower with it. I'd say I'll let you know how I go with that. The boot up did seem slow after the install but since I put this on my laptop and I tend to hibernate it rather than boot it and restart it. So it'll be a while before I know whether it adversely affects startup and shutdown.

Uses about 12MB of RAM, quite light.

[Dieselman]

My boot up and shut down times are fine. But yet I have my registry tweaked to boot up and shut down faster. With NIS 2009 my boot times were twice as long as with my current set up.