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http://www.kerio.com/kpf_download.html

This free firewall is much better than zone alarm.

Yes, agreed.

Which are the reasons for it, I mean, in which way is it better Brain?

.. and there are Trojaner or Viruses out there that try to shutdown Zone Alarm explicit, because Zone Alarm is used most...

Well, it´s a question of time when Kerio reach this level of awareness.

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: nestor on 2006-02-01 14:14 ]</font>

Reading reviews around, it is said that Kerio, Sygate, Zone Alarm Pro and Agnitus Outpost Pro, too, are the best firewalls of the market. The reviews in general will give the maximum of points to Agnitus Outpost Pro, but they also warn you about the need of deep knowledge if you want to use its power.

Now, talking about security suite packages:
The Trend Micro Firewall is consider “very” week, and it's antivirus one of the best. It is very light and efficient, but the only truly nice working program is the antivirus.

Zone Alarm security suite is considered the best all in one package of the market, with high ratings and reliability. There are extremely rare cases where a Trojan can effectively close the Zone Alarm firewall off; this is much a talking competence than a reality.

Norton Internet Security has a fairly good firewall, but it is a hog to your system, it takes far too many resources and has a few annoying bugs and problems. It can become irresponsive for long periods of time, and all you can do is wait till the control of the system comes back to you. It uses lots of ram in general, and its scan is slow.

Panda suite is a very good one, as long as you configure it with care. It’s firewall is not one of the best, but is far from being bad. It’s antivirus is excellent, fast, and it has “true-prevent”, a new technology that everybody is FOR SURE to emulate in short, that allows to watch for “possible” viruses that have not yet been declared as such. Panda was the only antivirus to stop a big plague last year, through this method of detecting “possible” viruses. All other antivirus programs could not detect the thread, as they use only the “already know” method.

Nod32 is another good antivirus with a similar technology which prevents “before” they are certified as viruses, some threads, nevertheless, the latest version, (I don’t remember the number of the version), is not recommended, as it has some problems, they have unfortunately overpowered the ability to detect unknown viruses to such an extent, that many have gone through the painful mistake of deleting dll files and others from windows systems, making their machines unavailable. So the antivirus became in fact, the virus.

***

Zone Alarm Pro firewall is not at all difficult to handle, it is a very understandable interface, clear and neat, with some reading about how the firewall works, giving and taking priorities with a little or programming, WHICH HONESTLY WORTH THE EFFORT, you are well covered.

Zone Alarm has many awards in their pocket already, as you can see here:

http://www.zonelabs.com/store/content/c ... me_awards2

Conclusion:
You can use either a suite, or separate elements. A suite works better than two or three separate programs. My personal recommendation would be:

If you have a server, use Panda Antivirus Platinum and Agnitus Outpost Pro in expert mode.

If you have a home PC with your studio, like most of us, Zone Alarm Security Suite, thumbs up for it! Or Panda Internet Security Suite, which will take eventually a little more recourses from your system; If you need more protection you need to hardware router instead.


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<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Nestor on 2006-02-01 10:57 ]</font>

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Nestor on 2006-02-01 11:00 ]</font>

Personally I use the NAT SPI Firewall which comes with my Netgear router.

Zone Alarm isn't very good IMO - you have to have the commercial version to do useful things like connection sharing and port forwarding (at least, that was the case when I tried it out before getting the router).

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Counterparts on 2006-02-02 06:09 ]</font>

Excellent but hardware firewalls do not detect outbound viruses, trojans and spyware.

Firewalls generally block in-bound connections, not out-bound ones. Why have a firewall which would prevent you from accessing the internet or receiving your email? You can configure a firewall to do this, but I don't see the point. If you become infected by e.g. a trojon then yes it will probably make outbound connections which the firewall will do nothing about. By the way, there's not really any such thing as a "hardware firewall" - a firewall is just a piece of software running on some hwardware.

There are a few very simple steps you can take to ensure that you don't get infected:

o don't use microsoft web/mail clients
o do not open or even view any suspicious emails, especially attachments
o use a firewall and virus checker

I just use a firewall to prevent incoming connections at home, I've never been infected because I don't do daft things like open suspicious emails and I only visit websites that I trust.

Don`t forget to configure everything to your needs. Firewall as well as router, splitter and so on.

be sure to check http://www.portforward.com

Some personal software firewalls give you the option to block outbound traffic and have a learn function so you don't have to do it each time. Many times software which is not internet software such as Photoshop will connect to the mothership for no apparent reason. They don't tell you what they are doing or why. Such needless connections should be blocked. I also don't like the free software connecting to tell you that they have a new update. If the software is working perfectly I don't want to update it and risk getting something that might have new bugs or newly implemented spyware and adware. It is also annoying to be told about the upgrades all the time.

The best solution, I think mentioned it before, is to have a second PC (they are dirt cheap nowadays) dedicated for Internet only. This was your work system is never in danger of becoming compromised.

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: BingoTheClowno on 2006-02-06 14:17 ]</font>

Or for more advanced users (read geeks) that want to run their own dedicated IDS (Intrusion Detection System) on a dedicated PC, they could download the free http://www.stillsecure.org/ package.

I'v always used Kerio it's intelligent.It asks you what to permit and deny,it stops programs starting other applications,tells you about all sorts of port scans etc.and it's free for personal use.!!

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: H-Rave on 2006-02-09 11:12 ]</font>

It doesn`t work too well here. While configuring it crashes driver IRQ not less or equal? Hey? Which firewall is in need of IRQs ??