The almost perfect anti-malware solution

To repeat an important theme, there is no silver bullet. There is no 100% guarantee. There is no perfect solution. There is no one-size-fits-all. Then again, let's try.

Give or take, what do we need?

• A two-way firewall to check incoming and outgoing traffic

• An old-school antivirus to seek out known threats

• A HIPS scanner to sniff out new threats

• A behavioral scanner to sniff out new threats

• A sandbox to run untrusted applications or for risky web activity

• Plus maybe a virtual machine if we're somehow upping the risk factor

• And last but not least, a dollop of good old-fashioned common sense

Quite a list.

Many folks use either a HIPS or a behavioral scanner. I use both for Windows systems, plus a VM for advanced sandboxing, for pentesting systems, and so on. Call me reckless! You, maybe, have a very conservative use of your PC, never touching torrents for example, and could maybe ditch the sandbox or the VM. Two words though ... zero day.

Let's take this list...