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Show HN: I got hacked, felt paranoid, made an app – GlassWire

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Re: Show HN: I got hacked, felt paranoid, made an app – GlassWire

#72

Stunning landing page! You get the message instantly and it got me curious enough to want to boot my windows box to try it out. Great job.

Thank you! The team spent a lot of time on the graph and we wanted to show that to the user before they downloaded.

Re: Show HN: I got hacked, felt paranoid, made an app – GlassWire

#73
Nice app. Please test it with the Windows classic theme (Windows 7/2008 R2), the "Glasswire" button is a bit glitchy.

What's the overhead of Glasswire? For me it's 2-6% CPU (of my many core systems).

What does the gwdrv.sys kernel driver do exactly? Hook into the TCPIP.sys kernel driver?

Is the "Glasswire control service" an app update service? Blocking it in the "Firewall" tab has no negative side effect so far.

Re: Show HN: I got hacked, felt paranoid, made an app – GlassWire

#74
post #40

Beautiful UI! Just curious: why not block connection attempts from new programs automatically? By the time a user has noticed and blocked future connections, it may well be too late. On a related note, I recently tested a number of firewalls for Windows using Comodo's HIPS and Firewall Leak Test Suite[1]; the only one I found that passed all tests with virtually no setup or changes was SpyShelter Firewall[2]. Not an…

I use Little Snitch on my Mac. I found myself just "allow"ing everything all the time anyway. I think most users just get used to pressing "OK" and stop even paying attention to what they are agreeing to. I know I get lazy and do that myself. Instead I wanted to briefly alert the user and let them make their own decision, then we also added in some malicious host monitoring and other features to help. Users can use o…

I've stopped using Little snitch a while back because it felt useless as I would indeed allow everything out of habits. Good decision.

Re: Show HN: I got hacked, felt paranoid, made an app – GlassWire

#75

Wow. I hate how so many Windows applications are considerably uglier compared to Mac counterparts. The Windows apps don't seem to push forward Windows design but rather get stuck in the Windows XP design days. This is beautifully designed and clear. The graph visualization is prime, and I love that the peaks are "rounded" out instead of sharp declines (sharp declines would make it look more like a live stock ticker).…

On the subject of Mac counterparts, I highly recommend Little Snitch for this particular functionality.

I have no affiliation with the developer, I've just found Little Snitch to be quite useful and thought I'd share (admittedly it's graphs aren't as nice as this app's).

Re: Show HN: I got hacked, felt paranoid, made an app – GlassWire

#77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can use your VPN with GlassWire and it works OK but we haven't tested in detail. I used GlassWire with my own VPN and I didn't see any obvious problems so far.

Awesome thanks, I'll have to check this out tonight! Just a feature that I'm thinking of right now that would be nice is if it alerted you that your VPN dropped or was disconnected.

Yep, I second that feature request. My OpenVPN connection with redirect-gateway enabled sometimes looses its route definitions and suddenly all my traffic goes directly to the internet instead.

Re: Show HN: I got hacked, felt paranoid, made an app – GlassWire

#78

Wow. I hate how so many Windows applications are considerably uglier compared to Mac counterparts. The Windows apps don't seem to push forward Windows design but rather get stuck in the Windows XP design days. This is beautifully designed and clear. The graph visualization is prime, and I love that the peaks are "rounded" out instead of sharp declines (sharp declines would make it look more like a live stock ticker).…

It might look good on "standard" resolutions but unfortunately it doesn't handle Windows 8.1 scaling and a high resolution monitor that well. For example the "Usage" tab is unusable for me with fonts cut off in half and labels to the diagrams unreadable.

Re: Show HN: I got hacked, felt paranoid, made an app – GlassWire

#79
post #70

well done. but useless for the intended purpose. most malwares will rip thru this like butter. i would only trust something like this running out of the box believed to be compromised. in the router for example.

The only true way to fully monitor the network is by tapping the actual wire. We started off wanting to make a malware tool but we found it was not reasonable so we tried to add more network monitoring and privacy features. The GlassWire software does look for malicious hosts and other changes to the system that could indicate malware but of course without directly monitoring the wire there is no way to see everything your machine is doing on the network. GlassWire works with your antivirus and is not meant to be an antivirus.

Re: Show HN: I got hacked, felt paranoid, made an app – GlassWire

#80

Nice graphs. On the site, why did you choose to promote the monitoring features over the outbound firewall features? Can it import existing whitelists or blacklists? If there are competing products (paid or free), a comparison would be helpful.

Our firewall uses the Windows firewall system so it doesn't add instability to your computer. I was afraid it would sound kind of lame to talk about the awesome firewall when it's more of a firewall manager. I think the monitoring feature is the most useful thing because you can go back in time and see your network activity for up to 30 days, or of course clear your history if you want. For Mac there is Little Snitch…

Your motivation and follow through is equivalent to your product's quality. I hope this is a trend that grows. Thanks for the work.
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