Small Business Tech

McAfee and Secure Computing has reached an agreement to merge. I follow McAfee because I strongly recommend their hosted security package, Total Protection Service. I and McAfee believe that this acquisition will enhance their product offerings and base. Secure Computing has developed appliances and hosted services for filtering email and limiting Internet access.

A controversial portion of the company's business is providing software to the countries of Iran and Saudi Arabia. They use the software to block Internet access to pornography, political dissent, and religious dissent. The Dallas Morning News has a great story about the struggle between censoring Internet access and circumventing those roadblocks in tyrannical regimes.

Limiting Internet access has become paramount for nearly every business large or small. With the amount of entertainment and distractions available on the Internet it is a valid concern. A couple of years ago it was concerns about pornography and shopping. Today with the quick adoption of online applications the distractions could range from banking to paying bills to catching up on TV shows.

Labels: mcafee, Secure Computing, security

Not long after an initial test of eEye Security's Blink personal computer security software, I received an email from Morey Haber, VP for Product Management at eEye...

Thank you very much for taking the time to review Blink. I am the VP for Product Management at eEye and would like to know what version of Blink you performed this review on ?
The latest version, Blink 3.2, does not suffer from the firewall prompting issues you described and when a permanent rule is created (check box in the prompt), the prompt is presented once and the entire application is trusted.
In addition, the application has its grass roots in many enterprise businesses and government and has a mature client base in these segments. The consumer or personal market is a new initiative for us and the newer releases have simplified the experience for clients and overcome these anomalies.
A free one year version is available from our website. http://www.eeye.com
Thank you very much for your time and I hope you will take a second look at out latest release.
Sincerely,
eEye Digital Security Product Management

I did take Mr. Haber's advice to download and try the newer version 3.2 of Blink. I had tried a early version of the software in my first review.

I began by visiting the eEye Blink site. The registration and download process is very easy, quick, and unobtrusive. Remember that this is a one-year license. Ostensibly after one year you will need to purchase the product. That is much better than many of the Norton's and McAfee's that only offer three month trials. I liked a few of features of the installation including...

• Privacy policy is short and well-written. Nothing alarming there.
• Allows user to select installation path
• Reminds to check Windows Update for latest patches
• No reboot necessary
  

The application immediately seeks to download an update once it is running. It then begins to ask about the behavior of many application in your computer that connect to the internet. I vividly remember that Windows Media and Skype made frequent appearances.

It features a control panel that is strikingly similar to Microsoft Window's own control panel. You can pick a program component and choose a simple on/off option or dig deeper for many options.

A check of system resource usage still shows an impressive low amount of memory and CPU cycle usage. This is refreshing compared to Blink's bloated counterparts from Symantec and McAfee.

I was still frustrated with the repeated asking of permission for applications to access the internet. I would make a couple of recommendations to Blink's developers. By default have Blink's application firewall ask about each application versus asking for each port requested by each application. This can lead to what appears to the untrained eye as several requests for the same application. The other recommendation would be for Blink to create a permanent rule by default. It took me a couple of attempts to authorize Skype before I checked the "permanent rule" check mark.

Overall, I would recommend this product for the home user. The part of this software that still differentiates it from it's competitors is that it is proactively looking for bad software or malware behavior instead of just comparing to a list of known viruses and spyware. It removes the zero-day attack hysteria that strikes the IT community frequently.

Labels: Blink, eEye, mcafee, norton, Patches, virus

Blink by eEye Security

Blink is a complete computer security product by eEye Security. eEye Security is a corporate security company that is well-known for researching and reporting vulnerabilities in Microsoft products. For some time they have build security appliances and software geared towards corporate customers. They are now pursuing the small business and home user market with their Blink product. I initially heard about the product on Leo Laporte and Steve Gibson's Security Now podcast interview with Marc Maiffret.

I signed up for the free version that is available for personal use. I installed it on a Windows XP Service Pack 2 computer and registered the product as required. This program follows the convention of other home use security products from McAfee and Norton. This is a not a good thing. Once the program is installed it immediately locks down any access into and out of the computer. It then asks what should have access. It then continues to ask and ask again. This behavior is frustrating and I think counter-productive. Most people get concerned or frustrated and begin to just begin clicking yes or no repeatedly. That does not enhance security and ultimately leaves the computer broken in the eyes of the user.

I could recommend this software for some computer users. Most namely those that do "typical" things with their computer such as kids or casual home users. This software is not intended and should not be used on business computers. Business and power users are going to quickly become frustrated with the many broken abilities when this software locks down the firewall and shared access. I should note that this software is intended by eEye for home users.

The software did uninstall without any caveats. That is more than what can be said for other competing products.

My initial reason for being interested in this software is the way that it uniquely observes behavior of software on your computer. Instead of just having a list of known viruses and spyware, Blink also looks for offending behavior that would not be performed by normal software. I was unable to keep the software long enough to find out how well this worked, because I became frustrated too quickly in trying to use it.

My recommendations for malware and virus protection software remain the same. For home users I recommend AVG anti-virus which is available for free. For protection again malware such as spyware I recommend the free Microsoft Defender. For business users I recommend the McAfee Managed Total Protection.

Labels: eEye, mcafee, norton, security, spyware, virus