McAfee
Personal Firewall 2.10
Just as Symantec acquired AtGuard, McAfee.com also took over Signal9, developers of the other popular firewallùConSeal Private Desktop. McAfee Personal Firewall has a somewhat complex interface compared to the other firewalls, though this doesnÆt hinder the functioning of the firewall at all. User intervention is needed only at times when a new program tries to access the Internet. You can grant or deny access to the application. The ruleset for the application is not as comprehensive as set by Norton Personal Firewall, but does provide the exact location of the program on your hard disk.
With McAfee, there are three ways in which the network traffic can be controlled. You can allow the firewall to filter the traffic; block everything, which would mean that you are completely isolated from the Internet; or allow every bit of traffic from and to your computer, which is a machine that has firewall but does nothing.
Various properties of the system such as allowing NetBIOS can be configured by clicking on the System option of the Settings menu. For a networked computer, which also has a dial-up connection, there would be two adapter settingsùthe dial-up adapter and the Ethernet adapter settings.
You can alter various settings of the adapters. You can enable or disable NetBIOS using the firewall, which would be very useful when you are on a network and want to share files sometimes. You can avoid fragmented packets used in DoS attacks by choosing the Block Incoming Fragments option. There are other types of traffic you can control using McAfee Personal Firewall, some of which may confuse a non-technical person.
The firewall logs unknown traffic without many alerts. The log file can be viewed with a normal editor and contains details about the adapter (useful for networked computers) on which the attack was logged along with a brief description of the attack and details about the attacker (IP address).
With proper adapter configuration, you can avoid virtually any kind of attack on your system. McAfee Personal Firewall did well in the tests and we could easily turn off the NetBIOS when it showed up during port scanning.
DoS attacks were easily detected and warded off by the firewall with no visible alerts like in the other firewalls! On the whole, McAfee makes a good firewall for technical people who want to have it their way.