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A newer version of eEye Blink Personal Free Complete PC Security is available.
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- Average user rating: stars out of 29 votes Back to product review
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5 stars
Version: eEye Blink Personal Free Complete PC Security 4.3
"An Outstanding Security Endpoint Suite!"
Pros: One of the few products out there that has a Vulnerability Assessment tool built into it! Protects from Vulnerabilities in software from being exploited. Can be most fully utilized by an experienced computer user or System Administrator.
Cons: Wish the Personal Edition of Blink came with a support portal (as the Blink Professional Edition does). eEye does provide a lot of help through customer's portals available to Blink Professional users only.
Summary: I have been using Blink for quite a while now (almost 2 years). I will explain why I like Blink so much and hopefully others will understand where I am coming from when I try to explain a little about Blink.
eEye Digital Security's Blink was intended to be an all-in-one endpoint security solution. It has multiple layers that have their own unique function and purpose.
- Note: Trying to install other security applications alongside it will normally cause issues for a lot of users.
1. Vulnerability Assessment - When you install Blink, you now have one of the most important tools available to you today that goes a step beond its competition when it comes to protecting your computer. eEye has given you, for free, their "Retina" vulnerability assessment tool. Most security suites can not compete with Blink merely for this fact alone.
- Today vulnerabilities in software are becoming the number one vector used to attempt to install malicious code on a system, effectively bypassing most all of the other security solutions available to the everyday consumer.
2. Application Protection - A lot of systems have "Application Protection" (i.e. generic protection aimed at stopping buffer overflows) built into them, BUT they are limited or you have to configure them manually leaving a lot of room for error and misconfiuration. Blink's Application Protection is enabled and is protecting everything running on your system. Granted you may have a few false-positives because of the way programs run their code, but Blink gives you the option of "Opting Out" of protection for any given application or processe if you need to allow something to execute to run properly.
3. IPS - Blink's IPS is very unique. Yes it does have the typical list of known attack signatures, but eEye has coded into it some very unique analyzers of their own. Blink's IPS also uses "Protocol Analysis" to detect exploits. Keep in mind, the Protocol Analysis I am referring to is not based on watching ports for a particular protocol, (i.e. 23 for Telnet, 80 for HTTP, ect). It is actually analyzing the protocol itself for malicious behavior or any attack that may be imbeded in the protocol.
- Protocol Analysis (used by a lot of your high end enterprise IDS systems) is the second biggest difference that Blink offers that separates it apart from its competition.
4. System Protection - Blink has a very unique System Level protection built in. It monitors a API calls within the system looking for malicious calls and or process termination attempts. This level of protection also contains two sub-sections covering the Registry and Execution protection.
- Blink's Registry and Execution protection sections allow you create custom rules to detect almost anything that could take place in the system's registry or to detect something that is maliciously "executing" (i.e. Adobe Acrobat attempts to run a .pdf file that has malicious code in it which when it executes it attempts to start a buffer overflow or attempts to initiate a Command Prompt (cmd.exe) session).
5. ActiveX Protection Engine - Blink has a patent pending ActiveX protection engine built into the IPS. This now allows it to protect your system from one of the more abused aspects of Internet Explorer.
Finally, Blink is designed to do one main thing, protect you from Zero Day Exploits. In other wards, Blink is protecting you from someone or something attempting to use an known or unknown vulnerability that exists in a piece of third party software or the Operating System. Other security applications are aimed at "detection" rates, which are still based on signatures. Yes Blink has signature based detection in it, hence why it has your typical AV component in it too, but that is not Blink's main purpose. Signature products still have their place in protecting you, but they are not the best way of detecting anything anymore. Blink is trying to proactively protect you from the vulnerability that is being exploited, to keep the malicious code from installing itself, running, and then pulling more code down to your local system. Most security applications still seemed focused on "containment" and such. not actually blocking the source of the problem. This is good and all, but if you?re infected, game over, you might as well re-image your system and start fresh.
Blink is not the fix to all problems, but it is a step closer to today's threats more than its competition is. I would honestly NOT recommend Blink to a non-computer savvy person (unless they have someone they can call all the time with questions).
If you are curious to see some of the alerts that Bink shows when something malicious attempts to run take a look at this post I made in eEye's forum: http://forums.eeye.com/forums/t/948.aspx
You can always download the latest version of Blink Personal Edition (free for one year) from: http://free-antivirus.eeye.com/
Updated on Jun 18, 2009Here is a better description of Blink that I keep updated for anyone that is interested: http://forums.eeye.com/forums/t/998.aspx
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