Arovax Shield is a free memory-resident program that offers protection against malicious software such as spyware, adware, browsers hijacks, trojans, viruses, worms, keyloggers, and other malware. It functions as a kind of a ‘firewall’ for the system/registry.
Most real-time antispyware protection software scans for traces of known code and/or applications that receive or send data over the internet. Other antispyware ‘immunizers’ prevent infection by modifying the places in the registry where the spyware would normally reside. Arovax Shield takes a little bit different approach in that it it does NOT scan your hard drive or memory for traces of code but keeps on the lookout for the different actions that malicious code typically performs in order to install itself on a computer; it will then foil these attempts, thereby preventing the successfull installation of malware. To quote the Avorax website “It blocks programs that attempt to launch automatically at Windows startup, prevents browser hijacking, protects the Registry, and stops various other stealthy installation techniques.”
Once it finds any suspicious activity, Arovax Shield can either ask the user to intervene in allowing/disallowing a certain action to take place (much as a firewall would when an application tries to access the internet), or it can ‘automatically’ make these decisions for you. I personally prefer the former, as most of the actions intercepted will invariably be perfectly legitimate applications. Running Avorax Shield initially feels very much like you’ve installed another firewall, and like a firewall Arovax Shield will ‘learn’ and remember your decisions so that you only have to make these once.
There are a number of good freeware antispyware and antivirus programs out there that offer real-time protection from both known and unknown threats. Still, because of the interesting technology behind Avorax I am inclined to add Avorax Shield to the list of staple security programs that I run on my machine (currently AVG free antivirus, Spyware Terminator, Spyware Blaster, and Comodo Free Firewall). I feel especially that Avorax Shield can potentially be the last line of defence in the case of a brand new threat that may slip in unidentified by any of the other aforementioned programs. During the few days that I have had this program installed I have kept close watch on its memory use and I am happy to report that it does NOT seem to require a lot of resouces to run in the background; it had no noticeable effect on my system performance despite the fact that I had many programs running at the same time.
Verdict: this software is a keeper.
Version tested: 2.0.62
Go to the program download page for the latest version. The developer’s home page.
Samer Kurdi
