ZoneAlarm 2.1
ZoneAlarm is a free personal firewall and has one of the simplest interfaces among all the firewalls we tested. Installing the program is easy and you have to register (free, of course) to be notified of updates and news. ZoneAlarm consists of easily accessible menu buttons such as Alerts, Lock, Programs, etc, which expand on to the window where you need to adjust your settings.
Once you have installed the program, whenever a program tries to access the Internet, you would be prompted to grant access to the program. You can give permissions so that a program such as Internet Explorer would always be given access. This helps in identifying and preventing Trojans and Automatic Password Senders from accessing the Internet without the permission of the user. The only complaint about this feature is that the program location is not specified which sometimes may be fatal because the newest Trojans use names similar to system files and the user may unsuspectingly give permission to a wrong program.
However, using the program menu button, you can alter the permissions to a program. ZoneAlarm comes with a pre-configured rule base and is effective too-the program stores the rule base in a database file, which gets updated when ZoneAlarm is updated.
Other than the above features, there is the Internet Lock feature that can prevent any applications from accessing the Internet. This feature is very useful for people having permanent Internet connections. You can also use this feature to allow only some programs to access the Internet. You can adjust the security settings using sliders. There are three options for your local server and for the Internet-High, Medium and Low. If you use a program such as Naviscope, then you would treat that as the local server. Depending on the level you opt for, packet filtering permissions are granted to applications that access the Internet. The logging facility is very useful for noting down the IP address from which you experienced the attack.
ZoneAlarm came out with flying colours when it came to the test process. In the scanning test at hackerwha-cker.com, none of the ports were found to be open. Other tests, including NetBIOS probe and SMTP vulnerabilities, could not detect security holes on the machine. At securityspace.com, all the vulnerabilities for which the firewall was tested were alerted and intrusion was detected and blocked. With the other tools we tested, ZoneAlarm totally blocked all types of attacks on the machine including Ping of Death programs and UDP Flooding. ZoneAlarm also prevented the Trojan programs from being accessed and did not show up any ports as open when a local scanner was used.
ZoneAlarm is free for personal use and costs a mere $19.95 for commercial use. It loses out on the features count when compared to Norton Security, though it still packs in a lot compared to other commercial programs. Unless you are driven by brand loyalty, this firewall is absolutely recommended for every home user.