Product Review: Zone Alarm Pro

By Richard Lowe
Posted Friday, November 26, 2004

I've tried using a number of personal firewalls, including WRQ AtGuard (since purchased by Symantec), BlackIce and ZoneAlarm. On my opinion, ZoneAlarm Pro is by far and away the best personal firewall on the market.

I like this firewall because it is the first product of it's kind that actually seems to have been designed for normal human computer users instead of techno-nerds. The product simply installs and runs. You can use it out of the box with no configuration at all. The program will ask a few questions and learn from you exactly what is allowed and not allowed. What could be more simple?

This program is one of the very best defenses against spyware, which is software that "phones home" every once in a while with information about you. Unlike most other personal firewalls, ZoneAlarm Pro (as well as the free version) stops outgoing transmissions as well as incoming ones. This in itself is a major benefit to the product.

One of the major advantages to this product is the way you can configure it to know the difference between intranet and internet accesses. That's the problem with some competing firewall products - they do not understand that intranet access is always to be allowed while internet access must be controlled. ZoneAlarm made this distinction easily.

One of the problems that has been found with other firewalls is the "pattern" for determining the identity of something accessing the internet is the program name. Well, as it turns out, this is very simple for hacker software to fake. ZoneAlarm was the first product to recognize and fix the weakness by actually performing a checksum of the product. This allows ZoneAlarm to be absolutely sure it has the correct program identified.

One of the absolute coolest things about ZoneAlarm is that it also protects your system from email viruses. For example, today I received an email with an attachment. The attachment was a virus, and it was renamed by ZoneAlarm to make it obvious that it was a problem. My antivirus software would have caught it as well, but it was really nice that my firewall stopped the virus even before that point.

So to sum it all up, yes, I would highly recommend this firewall. In fact, it is recommended over any other software firewall product.

Additional Information

Firewalls protect your system
(http://www.internet-tips.net/Security/Firewalls.htm)

You must protect your system with a personal firewall, especially if you are using DSL or cable modem.

Products - Sonic WALL
(http://www.internet-tips.net/Products/sonicwall.htm)
You really want to protect your personal computer? The best possible firewall solution that I have found is the SonicWall.

Tanstaaf - Spyware
(http://www.internet-tips.net/Tanstaafl/spyware.htm)
Be careful installing ad supported products - you may find that you every move on the internet is being watched!

About the Author
Richard Lowe Jr. is the webmaster of Internet Tips And Secrets at (http://www.internet-tips.net) - Visit our website any time to read over 1,000 complete FREE articles about how to improve your internet profits, enjoyment and knowledge.