Immunet Protect – Beta

This post was written by admin on March 20, 2010
Posted Under: Antivirus,Free PC Security,Free Program,Technology

Immunet Protect is a free pc security application which is designed to run alongside existing antivirus and antimalware products that users have installed on their computers. There are some known conflicts which users can find under Known Issues at the end of this article.

It makes use of collective intelligence via the community and also cloud based technology. The idea being that unknown applications that are either intentionally downloaded or downloaded in the background can be stopped from installing.

Currently, the community is quite small and its main competitor is Threatfire, which also uses community intelligence and behavior based technology to stop unwanted applications from installing as well as Panda Cloud Antivirus.

Immunet Protect is simple and easy to install and once installed it performs a 'flash scan' of all running processes and also 'Load Time' processes which are the boot processes. This scan takes around a minute, but this also depends on your computer, speed, memory, programs installed etc.

In the Settings panel there are the Protection Settings which consist of the following which are all enabled by default:

Monitor Application Install which examines all applications as they are installed including those that you install intentionally and those that install via background installation.

Monitor Application Start examines all applications as they begin to run.

Active Protection Mode - Now this is to stop unwanted applications installing until such time as they are deemed to be safe.

ETHOS Protection is the cloud based heuristics which is designed to find threats and add them to the cloud so that other users within the community can benefit from newly detected threats.

In the Notification Settings there is Cloud Notification, also enabled by default, which will give a popup informing users that they are connected to the cloud when the connection has been established.

Verbose Tray Notifications are OFF by default, and if enabled there will be popups in the lower right of the screen notifying users of all file events executed, if left disabled only important notifications are displayed.

The History Tab logs all actions, programs that were allowed to install and execute and those that were considered to be threats and quarantined. Should a program be accidentally quarantined simply click on the program name in the History list and users will get the file path, installation details, date and the option to restore it via a Restore button below.

The main user interface shows the summary of events: clean files, threats, number of users in the Immunet Cloud and the number of threats users are protected from. It also shows other antivirus programs that are running.

Having used this and downloaded malware, I was not highly impressed with the malicious programs that I was able to install. I am quite sure that the more people who join the community and use Immunet will increase the protection provided, quite simply, it needs more users who will all benefit from each other and from the cloud technology.

Memory usage is also quite high, there are two processes running, agent. exe using 23MB in idle mode and iptray.exe using 27MB in idle mode. Compared with Threatfire which uses two processes, TFService.exe using just under 4MB in idle mode and TFtray.exe using 1.6MB in idle mode.

I'm not going to say that it's a bad program because it isn't, it does detect changes and as the community grows so will the detection rates as information is shared and the database grows.

Download Immunet Protect here
Details of compatible apps here
Known Issues click here
Join the Immunet Community here - if using Immunet scroll down and click on 'I'm a customer'

Operating Systems:
Windows XP SP2 / Vista SP1 / Windows 7
Supports 32-bit and 64-bit platforms

I have found no problems using various firewalls, antivirus progams as well as Threatfire at the same time on different computers and operating systems, it integrates seamlessly with a wide variety of security programs, but please make use of the support available in the Immunet Community should you encounter any problems.