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The security industry seems obsessed with detection. Who detects the most viruses? Do you detect 98% or 99% of all viruses out there? How well do you detect brand new viruses that are not yet on any virus list? 30%?
Detection (and removal) of viruses is important. But there is something far more important.
The most important thing to do is to block viruses from your PC in the first place. In other words, prevention.
No software has ever been able to detect 100% of threats (or even claim to do that), so if you just focus on detection, it is just a matter of time before you are going to have a serious problem on your hands.
Here is an analogy to make the point.
- Free range chicken farmer: Let’s say you have 100 chickens. If there is a hole in the fence that a fox can enter, you are likely to lose some chickens before you catch the fox. That is why farmers spend so much time making sure there is no hole in the fence.
The same logic applies to your PC. The first priority should be to build a strong parameter in order to stop all attacks and viruses from getting onto your computer in the first place.
Our Firewall, OSFirewall, Browser Security, encryption and other technologies build a strong fence that beats all other fences. See my earlier blog for more on ZoneAlarm prevention.
An incomplete security test would be to put a whole bunch of foxes inside your fence and then see what happens. That is exactly what most PC Security tests do today. Testers by-pass your prevention layers (like our Firewall, OSFirewall and Browser Security) in order to measure which viruses are detected or not. Unfortunately, you are not measuring the most important part of the security system…the fence itself. Similarly, the typical antivirus test fails to evaluate your PC’s overall security.
Lots of PC security reviews focus on what is easy to count without testing the most important security layers which can give you very misleading results.
Security experts, reviewers, companies and consumers alike – please take note. Prevention is job one! Let’s keep our eye on the fence.