| Active Security Monitor Makes First Pass |
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| Tuesday, 13 June 2006 | |
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It seems the home PC security market is heating up as more vendors are offering solutions. There's no question there is a need for easy security and monitoring products, but this is a tough market to satisfy. You need to balance ease of use with useful information. The newest entry is AOL with a free tool called Active Security Monitor. It's a good start that can quantify your current situation and offer recommendations. You don't even need an AOL account to take advantage of it.
The first order of business is for me to admit I have a bias toward AOL products. I generally don't like them. Sometimes this history makes it difficult to keep an open mind when it comes to reviewing products. But then my non-emotional side kicks in and reminds me AOL introduced countless people to the Internet. The Active Security Monitor falls into the same category. It won't cover all scenarios and provide in-depth knowledge, but it will display to the user an easy interface with useful information. Active Security Monitor InterfaceWhat's appealing about this interface is the clean design. It's easy to glance at the main panel and to tell how you're doing. The monitor provides a score that you can track over time. You can also link up to 5 PC and get a network score based on each connected PC.  Click to enlarge As you can see from the screen snap, the program provides an assessment on 7 broad areas:
 Click to enlarge If you click the details button for an area, a side panel opens with more information and recommendations. You can see how your score would improve if you were to follow the recommendations. Some of you may be shocked to see I had a poor rating for spyware protection. So was I as I have an updated version of Webroot's Spy Sweeper installed on that test machine. According to the online help, this package should've been detected, but was not. I do have a more recent version than what was listed which might explain the issue. The program does have a feature to check for updates so I suspect we'll be in sync at some point. A similar issue occurred with Virus Protection. The machine that is running eset NOD32 scored excellent although it said the signature file was out of date. The machine that is running Computer Associates eTrust EZAntivirus showed as fair because it sensed the program wasn't enabled. If I go to my Security Center in Control Panel, I would see both programs are current and virus scanning is on.  Click to enlarge Although the program doesn't come straight out and tell you how many points are attached to a category item, you can play around and see the changes. As example, I turned off Automatic Updates and had my score drop by 2 points. You can discern this info by looking at the alert details. The Security CategoriesFor the most part, I don't have an issue with the main categories and I was glad to see they included P2P software. I think many people don't realize the risks involved with file sharing applications. I was also glad to see a category for wireless security. When I ran my first scan, I had a test machine connected with an Ethernet cable. I popped in the network card and did another scan. To my amusement, the notebook gave an audible alert like a submarine ping showing my score had changed. I went from an 82 to an 81. A message also showed in red in the Alerts/Messages section. I was pleased to see that the program distinguished between WEP and WPA encryption and gave me the lower score for WEP. My guess is the Windows and Browsers category is designed to catch some of the known weaknesses of the operating system and Internet Explorer. According to the help file, Firefox isn't supported yet. It also seems like the baseline for the browser is the default IE configuration. One category that I question is PC Utilities. I'll admit these programs have value, but I don't consider an optimization program essential to security. A case could be made for a backup program since one might rely on the program to recover from a security issue. As far as the score is concerned, it doesn't look like much weight is given to this category as there is no "Improve Score" button on the detail panel. An area where I did expect some differentiation is the type of user account. I thought the program might distinguish between accounts running as the administrator versus those running as a limited user account. I think many users run as administrators for convenience purposes, but don't understand the associated risks. Active Security Monitor RecommendationsThe recommendations are broken into two segments. One segment is AOL users and they are directed to the AOL Safety and Security Center. If you're not an AOL member, there are other links to C/net properties. For example, on Virus Protection, a link to the download.com antivirus page is provided. You can get some sense of the program's recommendations by viewing the help file. Perhaps, the most important page in the help is What Products Does Active Security Monitor Detect and Support?. This is where you can see which programs the monitor tries to detect. The list is comprehensive and on first glance the only noticeable omission I saw was the Kerio Firewall. It may also be an omission in the help file as the monitor gave me an excellent score for the firewall category where Kerio was installed. The help file is a good read on its own. I would suggest people step through the topics. While the topics don't go in depth, they do provide foundational information and some procedural steps. I think the page on impact of web browsers could be more detailed and less repetitive. While ActiveX can be a potential risk, disabling it may break functionality. In fairness to AOL, this is an area where I think Microsoft should improve as they provide little help to the user on browser security settings. Although the help file is good, there are some noticeable problems. The first is the Search feature. It should provide a search window where the user enters one or more terms and the system responds with the topics containing that term. Instead, you get a machine generated list of all terms. The user has no more information to know if they should click on support 1, support 2, support 3 or support 4. The process is made more cumbersome by the fact you need to first click on a letter such as "s" and then "s" again or one of the sub groupings such as "sa", "sb" and so on. Why so many clicks? The index button is nonfunctional. The reason I drilled down into the help file was I wanted to find out how to contact support. I thought I would inquire why the program isn't detecting some of my programs. When I was on the "What Products Does Active Security Monitor Detect and Support" page, it stated that "if you do not see a product on there that you currently have, please let us know". I've yet to figure out how to contact the company. The About menu option has no contact info, nor do the Help and Info options. They both lead to the help files so I'm unclear why both options show. Bottom line is the product doesn't have an obvious means to contact the company for feedback. You might think I would not recommend the product based on the above comments, but I will. While there are various web sites where you can test one aspect of security, I don't know of a free program that is this broad and easy to use. There is little downside to using this program aside from the setup which is minimal. It will give you a quick numerical assessment and you can see how your system fares. It may spot items you forgot or didn't even know. And if it provides an erroneous warning in one area, you can always look forward to the next release. We should be thankful to companies who try to improve computer security as it makes all of us little bit safer. Version Reviewed: 1.0.0.231
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| Last Updated ( Sunday, 30 December 2007 ) |
