ThreatFire, previously know as CyberHawk, is a pre-emptive anti-spyware monitoring tool that aims to protects you from malware before it gets anywhere near your system. It does this by monitoring the behaviour of your PC in real time to check for strange or irregular behaviour.

This method supposedly offers faster protection as you don't need to wait for an anti-virus signature file to be updated as with conventional antivirus programs. However, ThreatFire can interpret any kind of new behaviour on your PC as a threat and it can be rather annoying to get warnings and prompts every time you install a new piece of software. However, you can configure it to "trust" certain activity so you can minimise annoying messages in this way.

Obviously, ThreatFire monitors your PC in real time, but you can also configure it to run on demand although it seems there's no way of knowing the progress of these scans. Note that because this program is designed to protect your PC, it can be hard to fully close it down. Even when you've closed the window, it will run in your taskbar and even closing it from there is not clear. Overall though, this is an interesting alternative to conventional anti-spyware.