I initially only installed “Comodo Firewall” but for some reason they also installed a “Comodo Dragon Browser”, which I did not consent to. I always choose the “advanced” installation to uncheck bloatware, but in this case there was none and when you try to uninstall the browser, they force you to participate in their survey otherwise you won’t be able to uninstall the software…
The real question is why you installed sketchy firewall software I’ve never even heard of.
In the early 2000’s Commodo was actually a reputable consumer-grade firewall vendor. Like all security software vendors, they eventually became that which they fought against.
Create the problem, sell the solution
Huh. TIL. So why did they fade away?
Because built in security tools in Windows are much better and free. And enabled by default. Installing 3rd party tools is dumb at the very least.
Especially free ones that aren’t FOSS… 😂
Windows firewall and defender are hot garbage. It is one of the first thing I disable on a fresh install.
It’s better than most, if not all free options, as long as it stays online, which it doesn’t really require much data and it’s updates are separate from windows updates so you can let defender do its thing while limiting/blocking windows updates.
The online thing is what my issue is. Plus I take my security seriously so I have no issue paying for ESET. I don’t trust any free anti virus.
If you have serious security needs, yeah paying for a proper one makes sense, I’m not denying that. Just for the 99% of people who don’t need beefy security, defender is better than everything else free, and you were already giving your data to microsoft anyway so you might as well get some benefit from it. Defender is actually quite effective, and it has been since W10 at least.
Well, you’re just plain wrong.
Look you like fondling Microsoft, go ahead. Don’t go around telling people how good it feels. Too many false positive, too much information being sent back to Microsoft. No where near enough personalization or settings. Don’t get me started on the firewall. Might as well not have one.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yIaNZXgDtRU Here’s a documentary on a similar security company.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=yIaNZXgDtRU
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Wait did the Comodo guy also go crazy and kill a guy in Belize?
😂
Because you’re too young to remember a time when Comodo was a decent firewall option for Windows XP.
Because they already downloaded all the RAM they could so this is the next logical step.
Comodo actually has (used to have?) a very different firewall product. It would do firewall popups that let you IP+protocol+port level on demand, so you could block tracking domains without breaking online features.
It definitely used some janky hacks to inject itself into some weird places, but the intentions were definitely good when I last used it.
It also had options (framed as “levels” of ptotection) that would make more of those pop up prompts at completely nonsensical times about nonsense things - like declareing whatever you just tried to run was using a global hook. I had virtualdub up and opened windows notepad and it tried to tell me that virtualdub was using a global hook as if virtualdub was a threat.
In all my years in IT thats still im the top 10 dumbest things I’ve seen in software even all these years later.
To be fair, hooks can pose a security risk despite how useful they may be, and I would like to have control over such things. The Windows API made things like global shortcuts very easy to implement by writing a key logger instead of using the proper API, so many programs abused hooks and other risky APIs for these purposes.
The Windows API also makes it trivial to use these hooks without any kind of UI like recording software usually shows. There are combinations of window flags, positioning, window style, and weird compositioning tricks that will make these windows invisible to the user but seem like a normal screen recorder to any security software running.
Of course you should never enable such low-level security software if you don’t know what keyboard hooks are and how they work. I believe Comodo did warn you that some security levels were intended for experienced users, but like the Windows team discovered, every single user considers themselves experienced gods of IT if you hide options behind such warnings.
The real problem wasn’t Comodo or any tools like it, the problem was that Windows software used malware like low-level interceptions for things that could be accomplished using much better APIs they didn’t know about.
The issue and why it wss stupid wasn’t that it was a hook, its that it was attributing it to any app you opened when by definition a global hook is GLOBAL - you do users no gppd by scarinh them into thinking every global hool is malware frpm whatever random thing they ran. Those alert even would trigger on windows notepad. There is no reasom amy comnination of iser options should do this.
That was piss poor design and they evenyually walked it ba k after months of defending it by implying users amd security researchers were stupid on their forum, simce deleted. Its not in the wayback machine or I’d show you. Thier “fans” dogpiled on the topic after thier staff replied condesdingly.
That could be a Comodo bug, but honestly it could just as easily be a DLL injecting itself into random executables (had a lot of those in the mid 2000s/early 2010s, especially if the program used an IE panel somewhere to render HTML). I’ve never had Comodo freak out about hooks installed by other programs during the time I’ve used it.
I looked around on the internet for more context but all I can find are plausible/accurate global hooks and end users that don’t know what a global hook is. I’m not sure why they’re seeing this, I’m guessing they put up the “security level” as high as it could go without considering what that may do.
Not a bug exavtly - they didn’t think it through. To see what I was talking about you’d need a very very old version. Like way back when it was new. It seemed the that it was the developers that didn’t know what a global hook was. They were just very obnoxious about it before finally seeing reason and correcting the behaviour. At the time, it woild fire for -every- global hook. To my knowledge you can mo longer reproduce this, but the reaction they had to someone trying to suggest this wasn’t right was enough for me to never go near anything under thier brand ever again.
Comodo was reputable for quite a while
Similar to McAfee.
McAfee was reputable but trash from damn near the get go… Same as Norton
For many years comodo firewall and AV were one of the best, least obtrusive and consistently did well in detection charts etc.
Then I stopped using Windows so no idea what they are like now
I’ve seen a quick video about it on YouTube from a reputable Windows security YouTuber. Can’t remember which exactly, probably “ThioJoe” or “The PC Security Channel”. I wrote the softwares name down a long time ago and decided to give it a try today.
People are telling me it used to be a big thing in the 2000’s. No hate intended here.
That’s a mistake, always gotta be updated when it comes to these things and look up recent videos for suggestions instead. If you haven’t already, make sure to delete everything comodo related from every nook and corner.
Yeah, they should’ve asked you about it first! Duh!