Gizmo's Freeware Reviews: Best Free Intrusion Prevention and Detection Utility for Home Use (HIPS)

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26 February 2012
by MidnightCowboy

Introduction

Gone are the days when a virus was a virus and everything else was - well - different! Now known collectively as "Malware" these threats are constantly evolving and pose a serious challenge to security software. Signature based scanners give the most reliable detection results but these are limited by the frequency of their database updates. To compliment signature recognition software HIPS programs were developed which look for behavior on your PC which is “characteristic of malware activity”. The user is then presented with an alert to either allow or block the event. Some programs automate this process which can occasionally lead to problems. See my article “HIPS Explained” which deals with this and other issues in more detail.

Evaluating the performance of HIPS programs is far from easy and any so called “test results” should be viewed with a degree of caution. It is straightforward enough to feed malware files to a selection of signature scanners and then count what they find to arrive at a score. AV Comparatives provides an admirable service here and the results are always consistent and reliable. There is no such definition line possible for testing HIPS software and my feeling is that some of the vendors may possibly use this to their own advantage (“hype”).

Review Criteria

My objective in reviewing this software is to help users make an informed choice about the suitability of the products for their own requirements. In addition to information obtained from the various producers, I have used two methods to collect the necessary data and tried to present my analysis in a factual and entertaining manner. Part of my review is based on personal usage of the software concerned and I will be updating information about my component set-up on this page. I have also used third party data collected from sources I know to be reliable such as other forums where I have known some of the posters for several years. In reality no one can ever duplicate the system you use and the software reviewed may react quite differently between one PC and another. Ultimately, the best way to judge the suitability of these programs for yourself is to try them.

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