I’ve been seeing alerts for the past few months with most applications showing that they’re trying to access themselves as COM interfaces. For example: firefox.exe is trying to access the protected COM interface firefox.exe, or chrome.exe is trying to access the protected COM interface chrome.exe.
I’m running Windows XP SP3 at the moment, and this behavior started after a COMODO Firewall update sometime between September and November. The alert only shows up a few minutes after starting a program and does not seem to be related to any user action except possibly task switching. I’m not especially concerned by this, but it is a change from how Defense+ operated previously and I’m wondering what new kind of activity Defense+ is picking up. Blocking it does not seem to cause errors in the operation of any program that I’ve tried it with. Is this being caused by a Defense+ update, or could some other driver, service, or application cause this kind of alert?
It is also somewhat annoying that I cannot create a general rule to allow or deny this behavior. The file being accessed is different for each program, which means that I have to allow or deny the alert for every application individually. That just adds to the number of Defense+ rules I need to have, which makes “Remember my answer” even more sluggish than it already is with future alerts. Is there some way to set a default response for this particular event for all applications, with a template/placeholder to match the application’s filename?