View and vote on the article here: My favourite tools: Zone Alarm
My favourite tools: Zone Alarm| Category | | | Summary | | It is said that a good defense is always a good attack. I've tested this firewall for several months at home and at work and I've got good results. If you are deciding to install a firewall or you don't even know what is it, maybe this tutorial can help.
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| | Body | A Firewall is a software (or hardware) which blocks connections to your computer and also from it. It's useful when someone is scanning your ports or/and flooding them and even when you have a trojan installed and it tries to send info to outside.
Vendor: Zone Labs
Version tested: 2.6
Compatible with: Microsoft Windows 95/98/Me/NT/2000 and XP
Tested: Pentium II and Pentium III with Windows 2000 SP1 and SP2
License: Shareware. You can register for ZoneA Alarm Pro, but maybe it's not worth the trip.
Web Site: http://www.zonelabs.com/
Features:
- ALERTS: The most important feature of Zone Alarm. Here you'll find who and how tried to connect to your PC (his/her port and your port). You can log alerts to a text file and the best thing of this program: The "More Info" button. It directs you to a Zone Labs webpage where you can find useful information about what happened. When there's an event, a pop-up window will appear alerting you of it.
- Lock: As a screensaver, you can lock connections to/from the Internet with different parameters. Maybe you wish to lock Internet activity after 5 minutes but allowing programs to access to it.
- Stop: Pushing a very representative button, all Internet activity will be shutdown. This also happens to Intranet activity.
- Security: The most interesting part for me. You have 3 levels of security well explained both for the Internet and for the Local (Intranet). Depending of the level, you'll be more or less restricted to do such things as connecting to other machine's port 139 in order to get inside its user's HD (Medium level should be OK). In the "Advanced" settings you'll find the Local Zone Properties where you can set the Adapter Subnets which form your local network. You have to play with this if you are installing Zone Alarm in your office PC.
- Programs: You should be very careful about this. Here you'll find a list of the programs which access the Internet and their allowances (connect/server), and also you can set "Pass Lock" if you want them still connect in case that the Internet Lock is enabled. When a program tries to access the Internet at the first time, a pop-up window will appear asking if you allow it to do so. This is perfect for investigating if a trojan is lurking inside your system. Upside the "Programs" menu, you'll find the programs that are actually connected and if there are some blinking, is because they are sending/receiving data.
Bugs:
There are rumors that Zone Alarm is not capable to detect some trojans because of an internal security failliure. For the moment, I haven't experienced this, maybe because I'm very careful of what's getting inside my PC.
My Veredict:
Zone Alarm is not the panacea among the firewalls, but it's a good and versatile solution for your home and office. In a single window, you can keep controlled what's getting outside and inside your computer, and its friendly GUI helps really a lot. It's OK for experienced users and even for newbies.
Tutorial by Cpt. dante00 [Cyberarmy] 2/2 |
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This article was imported from zZine. (original author: dante00)
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