Free Security Tools Everyone Should Use

hello and welcome to the pc security channel in this video we're going to look at some free tools that are going to dramatically increase the amount of control you have over the cyber security of your system these are tools that i use all the time you may have seen them on the channel but in this video we're going to list them do a deep dive it's going to be fun so let's get started this video is brought to you by guardio so i'm going to start this list with something called auto runs which is a part of the sys internal suite by microsoft this is an absolute must-have on any new system as all of you who've bought a laptop or computer recently know especially if it's pre-built it comes with a ton of stuff pre-installed you may have built-in software adware bloatware whatever you like to call it and sometimes you won't be able to go into settings and just uninstall these apps individually and even if you do they will leave traces now what autoruns does is it shows you a list of everything that's installed on the system and configured to run automatically and that does not only include startup items there are startup items there are things in the context menu there are things within the browser their schedule tasks anything basically that hooks into the system so it can use the part of the system to run is going to be listed here and you can look at these categories individually as under log on under explorer so these are things that are built into the file explorer you can see things built into internet explorer schedule tasks and what's more if you click a magic button over here it's going to do a farce total scan for each of these entries and give you the results so this is also a very quick and effective way of identifying malware because guess what if malware is running on the system it has to start up automatically in order to persist and if you do happen to find something that you would like to remove or you don't want to run automatically you can just go ahead and uncheck it and that is going to prevent it from loading in order to do that you will have to run this as administrator but once that's done you can go ahead and basically uncheck anything you like this is a great way to diagnose any issues you're having with your system as well just go ahead uncheck some of the things that you think are suspicious restart your system and see if the issue persists and if you do happen to confirm that something is a problem then you can go ahead and right click and directly delete the entry this is an absolutely invaluable tool to have in your arsenal every time i get a new computer that's the first tool i go through and check what's installed and even if you don't remove anything this can give you a much better understanding if any kind of automated behavior is happening this can help you understand how it's happening and why and also allows you to customize things to your liking so for example when you right click they're going to be some settings here in the context menus if you go into a folder for example and right click on an item they're also going to be different options here and basically all of those are coming from the explorer entries here so if you want to remove something like for example the onedrive stuff you can go ahead and uncheck these you can control schedule tasks now on my main system there are ton of schedule tasks for updating various parts of my you know asus suite and what i like to do is disable everything that i don't have a use for and that's why i love using autoruns it's not only a security program but also a program that allows you to take back control of various aspects of your computer now the second tool we're going to look at is very similar it's called process explorer and this is basically a more powerful version of task manager and just like autorun shows you everything that's configured to run automatically on the system this shows you everything that's running on the system right now and once again if you like you can scan everything here using vars total so again this is just a very quick and easy way to identify if there's anything malicious running on the system you can quickly go through the listing and see if anything's detected by verse total as you can see the only thing i have on this system that's suspicious is process explorer itself but that's because some false positive detections are there some engines being aggressive detecting it because it's a security tool but if you have malware you're going to see a process here with 50 or 60 detections and in that case you can immediately right click and kill the process or kill the process tree which is better for malware because it's also going to kill any parent process that launched it you can also restart a process if it's kind of stuck or your system is hung up you can suspend a process if you want to pause it temporarily you can create a dump to get all the contents of a process so this is useful for doing any kind of malware analysis so if you want to dump all the contents of a malicious process it can help you understand what it's doing and any data that was sending potentially as mentioned it's kind of like task manager but for power users moving on but sticking with the theme of the first two tools we're going to look at pe studio which is basically an application that does the same thing that process explorer does for process and auto runs does for auto runs for pe files so any kind of executable file that you have on your system that you've downloaded or somebody shared on discord you can analyze very quickly using pstudio and you don't have to be an expert for it you just need to drag and drop the file and once again this is going to scan through the file give you any indicators that it has regarding malicious intent and it's also going to do a virus total scan once again a very quick and easy way of looking up any executable or exe file that you come across of course you will need to have some understanding of the pe file structure to make the most of this anyone can use it to do a quick firestall lookup and just verify that there's nothing suspicious about a file now we're gonna move to some tools that are slightly more advanced but still useful so this is hxd this is a hex editor and the most common use case for this is to look inside the contents of a file so if we drag in any file you're going to be able to see exactly what is written inside it of course this is not supposed to be readable but you can find some bits of text that might help you but most importantly it can give you an idea of the file structure so if there's a lot of blank space or any kind of obfuscation that a thread actor has used to hide the file or artificially enlarge it you're going to be able to notice that so if you see a lot of dots in here it just means it's free space so if you come across a file that's 500 megabytes or a gigabyte in size and it looks like potential malware you open it and hex editor and then you happen to find that everything inside at some point is just blank then you know that the file has just been artificially enlarged to avoid detection by your antivirus product and you can actually delete the empty space and save the file and then scan it so again a great way to get around obfuscation techniques next up we have some tools that are totally optional but still a great utility to have and that includes komodo firewall this is one of the most advanced firewall programs that you're gonna find on windows it gives you a lot of control it shows you all of your inbound and outbound connections it's got a great user interface plus it's a security program so it is going to protect you from things like malware it is going to do the job of a traditional firewall and it also has an intrusion prevention system or hips and this is various different modes by default it's going to come in safe mode but if you have issues with the alerts it's giving you you can always turn it on to training mode for a while hips and safe mode though is going to be good enough to protect you from a lot of malware so it can serve as a bit of a security program to bolster your defenses it's also got virus scope which is going to scan your process for any kind of malware and can also be used as a network monitoring tool so if you click on any of these process you can get a bird's eye view of all the connections that are being made from your system the protocol being used tcp or udp so again if you see something suspicious here like a malware or bitcoin miner connecting to a remote server you can easily terminate it it also gives you some powerful kill switch options so if you go here and right click you can go to block all and that's going to immediately block all network traffic you can set it to safe mode for filtering and also if you're installing this on a computer with a relatively inexperienced user and you don't want them to install any suspicious programs you can turn on auto containment and what this is going to do is sandbox any applications that run most applications that are not super sensitive will still run inside the sandbox and work but they're not going to pose as much of a security risk because they will be isolated from key parts of the system so this is a great all-around tool and since windows comes with windows defender by default if you're not up for installing a different antivirus komodo firewall may give you the additional security you need and it's free now the next tool we're going to look at is an antivirus now as i just mentioned windows defender is free and it comes with every system now but it's not necessarily the best so you can definitely upgrade your security with a decent free antivirus of course on this channel you will find tests of every security program that's out there but for the sake of this video we're gonna keep it nice and simple and we'll talk about two free security options so bitdefender antivirus 3 is a good one and the other one i would recommend is kaspersky security cloud both of these are absolutely free and they're great programs from a purely application security standpoint i think kaspersky is the more sophisticated tool but bitdefender is also a very easy set and forget tool that does not come with any additional software bloatware so for whatever reason you don't prefer kaspersky it's a great option to go with by the way since i mentioned kaspersky i know some people will be asking me about whether or not it's safe to use kaspersky products because it was originally founded in russia i've made a separate video on that which you can find on the channel called is kaspersky safety used now moving on the last tool i'm going to talk about here is bit warden this is a password manager and as you all know you absolutely need to have a password manager if you want to have any hope of having secure passwords on the internet what this is going to do is allow you to store your password securely and once again this is absolutely free to use syncs across all your devices so you can use it on your mobile phone tablet everything it's going to autofill your passwords as well it's very powerful i love using it and once again it's free so if you're not using a password manager already definitely go and check out bit warden so i hope you found this list helpful please like and share this video if you enjoyed it if i missed any of the tools you like make sure you mention them in the comments there are a lot of tools that i didn't mention specifically because they're paid and i wanted to just list free security tools but we will be making more videos about specific cyber security programs so make sure you're subscribed to the channel if you want to see that now time for sponsors this video is brought to you by guardio a web extension that you can add to any browser to protect you from cyber threats once installed it's going to scan your browser for malicious extensions notifications information leaks or hijackers you can also look at your emails and figure out if they've been part of any data breaches and once set up it is going to actively protect you in real time against any malicious websites that you end up visiting in order to demonstrate what guardio can do we're over at the wild side we're at fish tank which is a site that's a repository of phishing links these are websites that are going to attempt to steal your credentials as you visit them but we do have cardio installed on this browser so we'll see what it can do and as you can see the moment we try to visit the site it is blocked by guardio and because it's based in the web browser it doesn't really matter where the link comes from it's going to stop you from visiting it whether it was in a spear phishing email or you just stumbled across it in the search engine and it doesn't matter whether it's on mac or pc which is pretty important because you can still get phished on mac once installed you will also have access to a personalized dashboard that's going to show you all the statistics with cardio premium you can monitor up to five emails for information leak so it's a great way to bolster cyber security for your entire family these days it's just as important to protect your online assets since everything's interconnected and digital one of your accounts being compromised can lead to a domino effect so it's crucial to keep monitoring your emails and passwords and make sure that they're not leaked anywhere and guardio can help you do that so go ahead and check out guardio using the link in the description or go to guard.io and show them some love for sponsoring the channel this is leo thank you so much for watching and as always stay informed stay secure you

Channel: The PC Security Channel

Views: 514,712

Keywords: The PC Security Channel, TPSC, cybersecurity, cyber security, computer security, internet security, antivirus, anti malware, ransomware, trojan, virus, PUP, best antivirus, best internet security, learn cybersecurity, hacking, hack, security, technology, cyber insurance, cybersecurity degree, EDR, SIEM, best EDR, AI, best free cybersecurity tools, best free security tools, autoruns, sysinternals, system tools

Id: clHMz_Vs5WE

Length: 13min 14sec (794 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 13 2022