Product: ZoneAlarm Pro
Price: $39.95 (Receive $10 off by clicking this link)
Company Info: ZoneLabs
Editor Rating: 4 stars
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Pros
+ Provides back up defense that complements anti-virus and anti-spyware tools
+ Blocks incoming probes and attacks
+ Monitors outgoing network activity
+ "Panic" button lets you stop all internet communication in case of attack
Cons
- Needs initial "training" period to learn about your computer
- Pop-up alerts repeatedly appear for the same programs
- Constant 'nag' screens to purchase ZoneLabs' Anti-Virus product.
ZoneAlarm Review
ZoneAlarm is one of the premier firewall solutions for home and business computers. It provides a rock-solid backup defense against spyware, Trojans, and viruses. If you maintain sensitive data on your PC, are worried about internet intrusion, data theft, or even data loss, you should probably be running this software.
After an initial break-in period, the ZoneAlarm firewall will silently protect your computer against continual break-in attempts and other intrusions that anti-virus and anti-spyware programs don’t catch.
While the high-end version of ZoneAlarm (“ZoneAlarm Security Suite”) comes with a variety of other tools (anti-virus, anti-spam) designed to secure your computer, their real strength lies in their firewall offering – we recommend the base level product only (ZoneAlarm Pro).
Note: Firewall products protect against different threats than anti-spyware and anti-virus programs, and you should always run a firewall in addition to those other types of security products. Click here for more information about firewalls.
Installation and Configuration
Installation was straightforward on our Windows XP test machine and took less than 5 minutes.
Configuration on the other hand, is a bit more complex. Fortunately, firewall products are far easier to configure than they used to be. When you first run the program, ZoneAlarm kicks off a "configuration wizard" that asks you a few questions and will automatically configure the program in an optimal manner for most systems. We found the wizard to be a bit cumbersome and would like to see most of these questions removed from the next version of the program.
Among the questions the wizard asks are:
1. Do you want to share your security settings with ZoneLabs? – Although in theory this will help ZoneLabs create better products, we prefer to save our bandwidth, so we choose “no”. If you’re on DSL or a LAN, clicking “yes” won’t hurt you any.
2. Automatically configure the program using standard settings (AlertAdvisor)? – For sanity’s sake, we highly recommend you choose “Automatic”. Otherwise, you’ll have to spend a lot more time manually configuring your installation.
3. Turn on ZoneLab’s Antivirus? – We’ve not had good results with ZoneAlarm’s built-in antivirus program, so we prefer to leave it off.
4. Use ZoneAlarm’s built-in spam filter? – ZoneLabs has embedded MailFrontier’s Matador product into ZoneAlarm to provide spam filtering. While this is an ok product, there are better ones out there, so again, we choose “no”. If you aren’t using an anti-spam program already though, you should pick “yes”.
5. Turn on IM Security? – Definitely select “yes”
6. Turn on Web-filtering? – if you aren’t worried about kids surfing the internet, you should probably leave this off. It can slow down your browser.
7. Turn on Privacy Control? – This is built-in to most browsers these days, so leave it off.
8. Turn on Cache Cleaner? – Your choice. This will free up space on your computer and possibly make your browser run faster. We selected “yes”.
After answering these questions and re-booting your PC, you’re all done. Just a few minutes of work and you have now added a powerful layer of protection against internet threats to your computer.
Usability
First, you should be aware that there are some occasional annoyances you are going to have to put up with when using any firewall product. Primarily, you will occasionally receive alert pop-ups that will require your attention, such as the following.
ZoneAlarm raises these alerts when an unidentified program running on your computer attempts to access the internet. If you recognize the program, then click “allow” and you won’t be bugged about it again. If you don’t recognize it, you might want to “deny” it until you figure out exactly what it is. The good news is that you’ll have to deal with most of these one time only. We did find that for some programs, the pop-ups wouldn't remember our settings and would appear over and over again.
Annoyances aside however, you’ll feel real good the first time you receive one of these pop-ups:
This is an alert that someone on the internet has just tried to hack or probe into your computer, and you’ll see them a lot until you click the “Don’t show this dialog again” checkbox. We see these alerts about once every 5 minutes on our Earthlink account. Once you click on the checkbox, ZoneAlarm will quietly protect you against these intrusion attempts. (As an aside, keep in mind that your anti-spyware product will not protect against these hacking attempts. That type of software is designed specifically to remove spyware and adware only. Firewalls go a long way towards preventing that software from ever getting on your computer in the first place).
One problem that we have with ZoneAlarm is that it frequently asks us if we want to enable ZoneAlarm’s anti-virus functionality. Despite the fact that we click the “Don’t show this message again” checkbox, we still get it nearly every time we reboot. Hopefully the next version will fix this problem.
There’s just one more thing you should become familiar with when using this software: the “dashboard”:
There are just a few things on this window you need to know:
• “In” and “Out” data meters on the left – you can completely ignore these.
• The big, red “Stop” button – if something has gone horribly awry on your computer and you think you’re under attack, click this button to cut off any and all internet access.
• The “padlock” – this will temporarily prevent data access between your computer and the internet. You can click it when you walk away from your computer (for the overly paranoid) or it will turn on automatically if you’re idle for 20 minutes or so. If you run automated processes on your computer (for instance, automatic updates), this can interfere with these programs so you might want to turn it off.
• A list of running programs (on the right) – again, you can ignore this as it’s not very helpful.
• “Trusted” and “Blocked” zones (in the middle) – clicking anywhere in this section will open up a window that allows you to add other computers to your trusted list. This is very useful if your PC is running on a home network, for instance.
Summary
ZoneLabs’ powerful firewall product, ZoneAlarm, is a nearly mandatory product for most computer users because it adds a powerful back-up defense system that complements your anti-virus and anti-spyware software. After a short “learning period”, the program will quietly protect your computer without so much as a peep … unless you come under attack, in which case the program will lock down your computer air-tight.
Price: $39.95
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