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here’s no quicker way to
infect your system than to
tread online without the aid of a
fi rewall. Unscrupulous saboteurs
the world over are constantly on
the hunt for unprotected PCs, and
when they fi nd them, it’s open sea-
son for unleashing keyloggers, dial-
ers, Trojans, and other toxic trash
the riff-raff carry in their arsenals. But with
a fi rewall, you always know exactly what’s
trying to access your PC, leaving you in
command of who comes and goes.
Apply that same philosophy to your
hard drive and you have DriveSentry.
Borrowing a page from Microsoft Vista
and its now infamous UAC, DriveSentry
intercepts write requests to your hard
drive, giving you an opportunity to deny
or allow the action. To prevent being
inundated with permission requests
from harmless applications, DriveSentry
implements an auto-advisor feature.
Every time a new program runs, the
advisor dials home and looks for amatch against a whitelist of trusted
applications, as well as a blacklist of
known threats. Like your old high school
cliques, programs are labeled accord-
ing to how DriveSentry and the major-
ity opinion among the community of
users view them. A good program could
potentially be deemed dangerous, or
vice versa, though we didn’t run into any
issues with mistagged programs dur-
ing our tests. We did, however, run into
an annoying number of pop-up alerts,
even for trusted applications. Opening
Notepad, for example, prompted a pop-
up letting us know the advisor was dial-
ing home, followed by a second alert
telling us the program has been cleared
to run. We dig the diligence but not the
constant cries for attention.
DriveSentry’s greatest strength lies
in its level of customization. The dizzying
array of options is enough to overwhelm
even staunch RTS fans raised on micro-
management, but for those willing to put
in the time, you’re afforded a meticulouslevel of control over what fi les every
program can or cannot write to. You can
also create custom rules blocking a pro-
gram’s access to entire folders or drives.
Removable media, such as your USB key
and optical discs, are protected too. And
for armchair auditors, the Logs tab keeps
track of every attempted write ever made
and whether or not it was allowed.
We tried our best to thwart
DriveSentry, but viruses and spyware
never stood a chance, as long as we
intervened. Should less-savvy users
ignore the warnings, or worse, should a
band of hackers infi ltrate DriveSentry’s
servers, the advisor could conceivably
feed bad advice.
Even with the potential risks,
DriveSentry offers a level of protection
rivaled by only BufferZone. Combined
with an anti-malware suite, this is as
close as it comes to creating an impen-
etrable defense; just prepare yourself for a
steady, and annoying, stream of alerts.Keep track of every file and registry change made to your hard drive by looking in
DriveSentry’s logs. Even Windows Update can’t make changes without being noticed.Putting your trust in DriveSentry’s com-
munity of users will cut down the num-
ber of false-positive alerts, but we’re
not so keen on letting others dictate
our security.APPROVED $
http://www.drivesentry.com8 MAMAMAXIMXIMXIMXIMUUUUMMPPPCC | $# 08 | http://www.maximumpc.com
DriveSentry
A firewall for your hard drive
Security
Internet