Hacked Off? (Zone Labs ZoneAlarm)

Member Name: thisnamesux

Product:	Zone Labs ZoneAlarm
Date:	29/10/02 (348 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Protects pc, Enables instant internet lockdown without losing connection

Disadvantages: Have to allow/disallow everything that wants to connect to internet. Can get tedious

Ever since I downloaded Zone alarm for free from their website (you have to pay for a licence if you wish to use it for business, academic or governmental use) It has been great.
The general idea of the program is to be a personal firewall, monitoring all Internet connections, both outbound (from applications like MSN Messenger, Microsoft Internet Explorer etc? and anything that wishes to access the internet.)
If it finds a program attempting to use the internet, a small dialog will pop-up asking if you would like to grant permission to allow this program to connect to the internet. If you click ?No? then the program will not be able to connect to the Internet, however if you choose ?Yes? it will. Also, if you wish Zone Alarm to remember what you say, simply click ?Remember This? and it will do so.
This feature is particularly useful for stopping Trojan Horses from sending out information from your PC, and to stop applications downloading or uploading files that you would rather they didn?t.
It also gives you an insight in to exactly what applications on your computer wish to use the Internet.

Another feature to Zone Alarm is to stop incoming connections to your PC dead in their tracks. This is especially useful for stopping hackers from getting in to your pc.
When a hacker attempts to connect to your pc, he or she will search for an open ?port? or to most of us ? a secret door to which they can enter, undetected.
Before they can get this far, Zone Alarm already has blocked them and recorded their IP Address (if you wish to report them to the authorities)
Cause there are so many hackers out there, all searching pc?s all the time, the popup warning that someone has tried to access your pc does become somewhat repetitive, so you can simply turn it off.

The great thing about Zone Alarm is that it runs quietly in your system tray, monitoring everything, as you?d like it to, without disturbing your work.

You can a
lso enable an entire Internet lockdown, disabling every program from connecting to the Internet, and blocking everything incoming to your pc, should your pc be under attack.

If you wish to allow connections to your pc from a specific address, this can also be set up. See help file for more information on this subject.
A similar product to Zone Alarm is Norton Personal Firewall 2000, but I feel after using both products that Zone Alarm is better because of it?s ease of use, and the fact that Norton Personal Firewall 2000 is not free, and Zone Alarm is.

I recommend this product to every computer user, especially development and programmers like me, who don?t wish their work to be stolen, or corrupted by hackers.

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