Sybergen Secure Desktop 2.1.464
Secure Desktop has a very undemanding interface for a firewall, with the program having a slider by which you can control the security levels and change it to Ultra High, High, Medium, Low and Off. There is a Remote option on the working interface which was not mentioned in Help nor could we use it. Other buttons such as Config and Logs lead to the configuration settings and the logged events, respectively. You can test for the effectiveness of the firewall installed by pressing the Test button, which would take you to the Sybergen site and show if you have any ports open. A keyhole-image gives you general information about the attacks on your computer. If someone is trying really hard to intrude, the keyhole turns red. The firewall impressively detected and blocked most of the intrusion attempts and port scans. CyberCop Scanner showed that the machine had an insecure design and there were two low vulnerabilities listed. The easily accessible Log window is fairly comprehensive and shows the time, IP address and the port of the attacker and the local computer. However, the descriptions of the attacks are not at all helpful, with most of them looking similar even for different kinds of probes.
The configuration window is not so simple as the interface. Clicking on the Config button presents a dialog box with a whole bunch of tabbed windows. Thankfully, there are some options such as 'Allow to Browse Network Neighbourhood' that may help some one who has no knowledge of ports. You can also specify addresses that you want to trust.
Sybergen Secure Desktop also has other options such as e-mailing the report of attacks which is useful only for a system administrator of a network. The software is very prompt in blocking the programs that access the Internet and adds the list to the Application Network Access Policy through which you can enable or disable the programs. Other than the ICMP settings which any beginner would stare blankly at, the software is very usable if you manage to get it working.
This firewall gave us the most number of problems in terms of installation and configuration. The software installation presents with two options-one for the consumer and the other for the business. We chose the consumer version and got the free registration key from Sybergen through e-mail. Following the steps of ZoneAlarm, Sybergen recently announced their firewall is free for personal use.
When we installed this firewall on the target machine, which had both the dial-up line and was connected to the network, for some reason it failed to protect the machine although it never gave any error message. SubSeven, installed before the firewall on the machine, could be easily controlled from another machine, and the firewall just didn't seem to work. The software did not work either when we tested on two other machines-one a Windows 2000 machine and the other with a similar configuration as that of the test machine. We almost dropped this software from the test, but as a last resort, tried installing on a Pentium 166 MHz MMX with 48 MB RAM and it started working. However, due to this delay we could not carry out the first test on this machine, namely scanning from Web sites.