Over the last months I have spent some time playing around with various anti-virus and firewall software. The problem with computer security is that while it keeps you safe, or at least safer, it tends to introduce some negative side effects as well. The PC I am writing this on is rather old, so system resource usage is always a big concern of mine – I like to keep my PC snappy and responsive, so I don’t want to install anything that slows things down significantly. This rules out popular security suites of F-Secure or Norton – especially the latter seems to be able to kill the newest of PC’s in terms of performance. For quite some time I used the combination of Sunbelt Kerio firewall (free limited edition) and Avast! anti-virus (totally free) but I felt that an integrated solution might be more convenient. I was very tempted to buy the security suite of Eset NOD, as their anti-virus engine is probably one of the fastest, but their firewall was rather spartan. So I decided to give a spin to the latest offering of Comodo and their Internet Security suite and I am quite impressed – it’s a full-blown suite of applications that wont kill your computer and you can’t beat the price – its’ free.

Comodo is actually quite famous for their excellent free firewall software. Especially power users will enjoy it’s configurability and options, which all are nicely laid out on a well designed GUI. It is also pretty well pre-configured as it recognizes the most common Internet applications (most browsers, instant messengers…) and categorizes them as safe application, thus not alerting the user. In case of an unknown application attempting to connect an alert is show. Interesting addition in the latest version is ThreatCast database, where Comodo  collects user’s responses to firewall alerts and aims to classify more files based on that – as we see in the screenshot, the FileZilla FTP client however was still unknown to the system (which is somewhat surprising?).

Comodos’s suite also has so called proactive defence features, branded as DEFENCE+. This is basically application behaviour blocking and authorization – the fireall will alert users on various application behaviour events. For an example application installations or application attempting to modify or launch another will cause a DEFENCE+ alert. Personally I find this kind of protection somewhat intrusive, and I doubt that it is very good for inexperienced PC users either, since the user has to have some knowledge whether an application should be allowed to do it’s thing or not. Anyway, the feature is there if you want it – I dont.

Conclusive anti-virus tests are impossible to conduct without a sufficient virus database and fortunately my PC is clean, so this part of the software suite is more difficult to evaluate. The good news is that Comodo’s real-time scanner doesn’t seem to be resource hog. I would guess it would fall to the similar category of Avast!, but this is purely subjective evaluation. I also tried the latest AVG recently, and it seemed to drag down the system much more than these two. What I would like to see is more options for the real-time scanner – personally I like to limit scanning to file system write operations only for improved file read and execution performance. Why? Well, a first thing a virus will try to do is to replicate and infect files, which is a write operation. This is of course somewhat less secure, at least theoretically, but it will improve the performance, but as said such options are not available.

I Googled around for anti-virus software benchmarks, but it seems that not too many conclusive ones are performed on Comodo. This report published by VirusInfo suggests that Comodo’s detection rate is somewhat mediocre. It is well below the best performers, but delivers similar detection rates than Sophos, Trend Micro or McAfee. Personally I don’t see this is as a huge concern. The virus database seems to receive updates almost daily and these days information of major virus infection outbreaks is so rapidly distributed on the Internet that I have little doubt that Comodo wouldn’t update their database rapidly if such event occurs.

Overall I am very pleased with Comodo. It delivers an excellent firewall and a decent anti-virus in one integrated package and does it without destroying computer’s performance – and it’s free. If you want to play it extra safe you could just use their firewall-only solution and combining it with Avast!, which seems to deliver a bit higher detection rates, but then you would lose the benefits of an intergated solution. At least be sure to check out COMODO’s offer before going shopping on the security market.

Download Comodo Internet Security: CLICK HERE