Today I updated my YourFreedom client - a program used to proxy around the internet. As soon as I opened it it crashed. Silently. After MUCH debugging I found the cause - the hosts file had a bad entry.
It was two addresses one after another on the same line with no spacing. They were added there by a program I had long removed.
I then came to understand the importance of keeping a clean hosts file. Over an year of using my computer and only a handful of unnecessary entries were added in the hosts file. The hosts file isn’t just for everyone. It should be protected. Why not give Comodo an option to lock it and prevent both accidents like this and tampering by malware accidentally allowed?
This can be done manually by adding C:\WINDOWS\SSYTEM32\DRIVERS\ETC\HOSTS. to “My Blocked Files”, but it would be a nice option to have as part of the initial setup.
It is possible to create a category in my protected files, “Read-Only Files”, add hosts to it, and put it under Blocked in all predefined policies aswell as newly detected programs. This makes it so that all old and new apps can read but not write to it. But it’s tedious and should be more readily available to the user, like under Firewall Settings as a checkbox.
