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Firewalls: Winner? Norton Firewall 2004; ZoneAlarm
Pro 4
November 25, 2003
No surprises in the firewall department: This time Zone
Alarm Pro 4 joins Norton
Personal Firewall 2004 for the distinction. Both
provide excellent protection, are highly customizable, and
work with little fuss. Both also give you a decent
ad-blocking feature. Norton's firewall adds protection for
specified data, while Zone
Alarm Pro 4 is more tightly integrated.
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McAfee
Personal Firewall Plus 5.0
November 25, 2003
By Edward Mendelson
McAfee
Personal Firewall Plus 5.0 has a cheerful, rich
interface, and its default settings give home and
small-office users a high level of security. But some
uninformative dialogs and needlessly alarming pop-up
messages make it less than perfect for non-technical
users.
An installation wizard asks you what level of alerting you
prefer, the kind of network and connection you have, and
whether you'll trust the program's recommendations or
require confirmations. Knowledgeable users can choose
three levels of protection in addition to total openness
and total lockdown. You can't customize the three levels,
and Internet access for individual applications can be
customized only to block, permit, or permit only outbound
access. There's no way to specify that an application can
use one port but not another.
The program's control panel recommends that new users view
a summary screen that reports which applications are
running and shows the most recent security event, with an
option to find the physical location of the remote machine
or trust it in the future. Remote machines are identified
only by IP address, and the dialog doesn't explain whether
or not you should worry about a ping from that address,
for example.
The pop-up warnings include links to more detailed advice
on whether to permit or deny access. One potentially
alarming kind of warning message appears when McAfee
Personal Firewall Plus 5.0 wants to alert you to a
new virus detected in the field. It's easy to mistake this
for a warning saying the virus was found on your system.
Clearly, McAfee has some catching up to do on its personal
firewall.
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Norton
Personal Firewall 2004
November 25, 2003
By Edward Mendelson
Few programs successfully balance the needs of beginners
and experts, but Norton
Personal Firewall 2004 gets it exactly right. The
software offers thorough and easy-to-use protection out of
the box and easy-to-manage fine-tuning of security and
privacy settings.
An effortless installation followed by online product
activation (required within the first 15 days of use),
sets up the firewall for medium-level security. This level
puts all ports in stealth mode and pops up an
easy-to-understand alert when intrusions occur or
applications first try to access the Internet. A
configuration dialog has a slider for switching from
medium to lower or higher security levels, and each level
has custom settings for allowing Java and ActiveX applets.
A network detector feature automatically switches a laptop
between customized profiles for home, office, and mobile
use. Expert users can dig deep into option dialogs for
total control over the way specific programs connect to
the Internet or how specified Web sites connect with their
PCs.
Privacy control features prevent data like credit card and
Social Security numbers from being uploaded to non-secure
sites. An intrusion detection system purposely reports
only the most common types of intrusions to avoid
cluttering the screen with messages, but the firewall
silently protects against intrusions that the detection
system doesn't report. New intrusion and software
signatures can be automatically or manually downloaded via
Symantec's LiveUpdate service.
Norton's ad- and pop-up–blocking feature is more easily
customizable than anyone else's. A Web Assistant toolbar
added to Internet Explorer lets you selectively block or
allow ads and pop-ups from individual sites, and an
optional Ad Trashcan lets you drag ads from the browser so
that they'll be blocked in the future. Combining the best
in ease of use and protection, Norton
Personal Firewall 2004 shares our Editors' Choice
with Zone
Alarm Pro 4.
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Zone
Alarm Pro 4
November 25, 2003
By Edward Mendelson
Zone Labs' Zone
Alarm Pro 4 is a one-stop security package that
combines an easily customizable firewall with program
control and ad-blocking features. It also includes e-mail
security, which quarantines dangerous attachments and
prevents worms from sending mass mailings from your
machine. It's almost as friendly and feature-packed as Norton
Personal Firewall 2004, but it lacks Norton's
privacy-protection features.
Zone
Alarm Pro 4's options are clear and highly
customizable, with every control accessible from a single
tabbed interface, with none of the obscure detours found
in less integrated packages. A tray icon displays a bar
graph of current inbound and outbound traffic. Warning
messages include links to detailed advice on deciding
whether to let an application access the Internet. If you
frequently download new versions of your favorite software
and don't want to be warned about each new version, you
can tell Zone
Alarm Pro 4 that an application changes often, and
it won't bother you with such warnings.
Installation on our multi-network test systems was
effortless, and the program asked us whether to include
specific networks in an Internet zone or a local-network
Trusted zone (with more lenient security settings). The
control panel lets you specify high, medium, or
firewall-off security levels for both the Internet and
Trusted zones, with options to customize the high and
medium levels. The default high-security setting stealths
all ports, while the medium setting leaves them visible
but closed. When you upgrade or uninstall the program, a
prompt asks you whether you really intend to turn off its
security in order to prevent un-installation by rogue
software.
Ad blocking is almost as effective as in McAfee
Internet Security Suite 6.0 or Norton
Internet Security 2004 , but it distorted the
display of some non–ad banner graphics.
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