DDoS: don't be part of the problem

I didn't hint at or say anywhere that you are infected, or that I think you are. I was suggesting that (as anyone working in anti-virus research, higher level network stuff or anything remotely related to network security would) the old ways of "internet smarts" and "behavioural analysis" are hopelessly outdated and redundant. Indeed there was a level of snarkyness, because of your own tone against others in the thread, particularly your general tone of authoritativeness, when again - everyone I know who works in any higher level IT-related function would call you careless and naive to even be connected to the 'net with no form of protection other than your modems' built in firewall, nowadays. And then there is, of course, the whole point made in the OP, about encouraging the spread of malware - thus lowering the security of this global WAN called the internet that we all use - by your stubborn refusal to use protection, even when you're shown examples of lots of stuff that can (and does) go wrong even with the utmost care in usage habits and monitoring, without your awareness. I wasn't trying to help you, I was critiquing your stance and challenging it (not trying to put you down) by asking just exactly how you were monitoring and protecting your network. You're indeed in some part a potential part of the problem, albeit of course with a far lower potentiality than some absolutely clueless "oh what's this? A BIGGER PENIS?! CLICK!" user - but still a big enough potential part of the problem for me to be critical of, especially if you're someone who from all posts on the thread seems to be someone with a bit more IT related knowledge than your average shmoe - you even directly hint at it in some posts.

Like I said to someone else in the thread - "guess you've never heard of SQL injection, XSS attacks / exploits, drive-by downloads, 1-pixel malware, DNS spoofing attacks, DNS amplification, ARP poisoning, man-in-the-middle attacks, or idle-detection trojans"? Do those terms mean anything to you? The point I'm making is that 90% of modern malware / exploits are entirely silent, background processes that show nary a hint of processor usage, open ports, or anything else you could easily detect with some basic sleuthing. Malware makers / exploit discoverers aren't stupid - particularly modern ones; they're people more knowledgeable than you and me combined. They know very well how people like you and me detect stuff amiss with their rig / home network. They code them to do nothing of note until your PC's been idle for an hour, or in sleep mode, or even hibernating. They code them to terminate all their activity before anything else is done on the PC when it leaves an idle state. They find ways to infect known websites, or redirect traffic from your PC to somewhere entirely different than where you intend to be. All it takes is editing a little C-record here, doing some DNS spoofing there, and you're whisked off to their own server hosting silently installing and performing malware, when you try to visit "cnn.com" or "steamcommunity.com". Or maybe that's not even necessary because a "known good" site is already distributing malware for the bad guys, who did some SQL injection the night before. How do you know, by the way, that your PC isn't aiding in a DNS amplification attack on someone staight from your own Windows DNS caching server? No, checking out your open ports wouldn't help you with that.

Here's some light reading for you:

http://gcn.com/Articles/2013/05/13/Universities-get-schooled-DNS-amplification-attacks.aspx?Page=2
http://www.ren-isac.net/alerts/dns_amp_ddos_tech_201305.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNS_spoofing
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNSSEC#Overview

And these links only concern DNS-related stuff. There's oodles more about exploits and vulnerabilities concerning other security vectors you seem to not be aware of that you can Google at your leisure. You been keeping up to date on what BHO's you have installed? What about your LSO's?

I find it a little demeaning and ridiculously naive to be calling someone like me "unhealthily paranoid" when it appears you're just not as informed as I am about current threats out there. It's not paranoia - it's being cautious, aware, up-to-date and responsible. I'm responsible for what my PC puts out there on the 'net, something you cannot say, no matter how hard you monitor your stuff or use it intelligently.

As for your gripes concerning Comodo - firstly, when I install any new game or program I have acquired from a known good source (which as I explained above might not always be good), I run it through Malwarebytes and Comodo AV first to do some signature-based and stringent heuristic checks on the files, then set Comodo to "game mode" and turn off filesystem protection on Mbam before I run the installer. Easy peasy, no harm done, installer completes just fine. I turn it back on once it's done. And yes, the first time I run a game or program I might get a few popups come up asking permission for this or that, but once I allow it once, I'm done from then on. After any new OS install, indeed, the first few weeks might be a bit full of popups, but it's nothing more inconvenient than 2 or 3 mouse clicks and a few seconds' of my time, and only needed once. Once I have a good whitelist set up, I'm basically done. I too often run new software, do all kinds of "power user-y" things on my PC, and if I get 1 popup a day, it's a lot.

The balance between "unhealthy paranoia" and "sane caution" isn't "yes/no to something like Comodo in its' entirety" (as it used to be maybe 10 years ago when threats were simpler in their make-up and behaviour, and running an antivirus program really taxed the then-current hardware enough to slow down overall PC operation very significantly), it's "should I keep it turned on when installing known good software, even after virus checks, and manually allow any and all reg keys it tries to make, any and all file system changes, etc?" Yes, I turn Comodo off when installing new stuff I know to be good, because not doing so would indeed feel too paranoid. Same for not forming a whitelist and letting programs do the same stuff twice without consent - that'd definitely be a little too paranoid for my liking and would hamper my usage too much. But not having some form of decent protection installed and running during normal usage? That's irresponsible, lazy and extremely naive (nowadays), and frankly surprises me as a stance coming from someone who purports to be "IT informed". If you're truly oldskool (as I think you are), tell me what was the holy exclamation from early hackers / related types? RTFM. It was more than an acronym to be taken literally. I was a whole mentality that was being espoused. Take your time, actually read and learn something, set settings right, know what you're working with. All it takes is reading through some settings, taking maybe an hour of your time the first time you install something, perhaps teaching you new stuff in the process, then a few seconds the first time you run something - a small price to pay to know you're as secure as you can get without going to lengths such as chucking a network analyser and packet filter on a hardware firewall setup like ISPs and corporations do.

"..showing just a black screen while waiting for you to somehow alt+tab and allow whatever action it wants to take, but you can't?" - umm, you know you can smack Ctrl-Alt-Del a few times then and get a Task Manager open so you can see behind the blackness and allow whatever you need to if a simple Alt-Tab won't do it, right?

"And don't tell me you haven't noticed just how slow things run when Comodo is detecting a new program for the first time." Yep, the first time. So? Boo fucking hoo dudeguy, so I lost a couple of precious seconds to allowing something once, as part of behaviour meant to keep me secure. Those aren't seconds I have to worry about many times a day, thus making them significant. They only are used up once, to allow something. If I had to do this many times a day then sure, I'd agree that it matters (because I know how seconds here or there in usage can add up to lots of lost productivity and usage time - I even modelled my browser install after that very concept, installing addons and tweaking the UI layout to aid in doing stuff as fast and with as little interaction[s] needed as possible)!

Please bear in mind that any snarkyness I display isn't meant to piss you off / provoke you or even be disrespectful towards you, but even among friends or compatriots, disagreeing often happens with a slight snarky tone. I respect the fact that you at least give a damn about this stuff, and aren't totally oblivious / unconcerned, as unfortunately a shit tonne of people - we both can agree - are. And I am genuinely still interested in what form of hardware / software you have running as part of your protection / monitoring, as you hinted at some stuff in other posts on the thread.

So which one is fast and filters any viruses at all that harm my Linux?

No, there most definitely is.