One person, in Belgium.
AFKSecurity is written and published by David Maus, an independent developer in Vaux-sur-Sûre. There is no team, no investor and no cloud service behind it.
The same person publishes AFKLiveTranslate 2, AFKClipboardGuard and Vaudryllis. All four share one idea: the work happens on your machine and stays there.
Two programs.
A service that starts with Windows
The watching part runs as a system service and starts before anyone signs in. It has no window, no rendering engine and no graphical library.
A window that asks for nothing
The interface runs with ordinary user rights. Separating the two means the web rendering engine, by far the largest attack surface in the product, no longer has administrator rights, and you no longer see an elevation prompt every day. A prompt you see daily is a prompt you click without reading.
Nothing is kept between two runs
The substrate holds its state in memory and rebuilds it completely at every start. There is no internal database to grow, to corrupt or to leak.
You can stop it, properly
From the window, the tray icon or the command line. An administrator can stop it too. Stopping it is always recorded and visible.
One folder, one file, sealed.
Findings are written to a local journal, where each line seals the one before it with a SHA-256 chain. A line cannot be altered or removed without breaking the chain, and the break is visible.
%ProgramData%\AFKSecurity\journal
It is stored outside user profiles, so the account being monitored cannot modify it. The file rotates on its own and never leaves the machine.
There is no quarantine folder: nothing is ever quarantined. Suspected programs are frozen, which is reversible, and recovered files are written beside the originals under a new name, never over them.
The short version.
- Not an antivirus. No signatures, no scanning, no file analysis.
- No email protection and no web browsing protection.
- Not registered with the Windows Security Centre, and it does not appear there.
- No guarantee of result. No security software can promise to catch everything.
- Not a replacement for your backups, your Windows updates, or your own judgement.
The full list, with the measured figures and the MITRE ATT&CK mapping including its gaps, is on the features page.
Everything is written down.
All of these are installed with the software as well, and readable from its About tab, offline, in the version you accepted.