Zone Alarm Firewall – Firewall Reviews
Zone Alarm is an antivirus and security application originally created by Zone Labs, who were acquired in 2004 by Checkpoint, the makers of Checkpoint firewall. Zone Alarm is a very robust application that contains an inbound intrusion detection system and has the ability to control what programs are allowed to connect to external network hosts. Zone Alarm includes Kaspersky’s award winning antivirus software and Mail Frontier’s anti spam utilities. It costs $69.95 and includes a 15 day free trial. Zone Alarm is actually a collection of programs that all work in harmony to provide a protection package.
Zone Alarm manages security in “zones”. A zone is either trusted, un-trusted, or somewhere in between. Usually, a user’s local network is inside the trusted zone and the internet within the untrusted zone, this is the firewall’s default policy. When a program launches, the user selects under which zone the program should be allowed to operate under. I would like to attempt to make a metaphor here. In the security world, we have what’s called role based access control and Zone Alarm’s “zones” are a pretty broad example of this technology. On our network here at work, when a user authenticates, they send their credentials to a login server which gives them the minimum access required to accomplish their job. Like Zone Alarm’s trust zones, each user only has access to what they need, not what they want. Zone Alarm also offers as part of their package, an Operating System Firewall, Anti-virus protection, anti-spyware protection, total ID theft protection, multiple layers of security and finally a new interface.
The anti virus protection is provided by Kaspersky; it is both very good and very secure. It picked up all of the viral intrusions during my private test of it and has received numerous awards for its excellence. The ID Theft prevention has more to do with Zone Alarm’s ability to detect and stop spyware and phishing attacks, Zone Alarm picked up all of the spyware infections I had installed on my computer and then cleaned them with little fuss. Zone Alarm also has a service called True Vector monitor which is a service that runs on Windows in the background. Its job is to monitor the internet traffic and warn the user if something is doing something it should not be. Working in conjunction with the True Vector Monitor, the firewall works to warn the user of inbound threats and suspicious behaviors. Finally, Zone Alarm have a feature called the Smart Defense Advisor, the job of this program is to assist the user in keeping their system up to date. The Smart Defense Advisor (SDA) contains a large database of programs which when run, the SDA will make recommendations on which level of trust it thinks that the program belongs under. Finally, I’d like to mention that Checkpoint has a very nice knowledge-base; they draw on their network security expertise to create a total security solution that is Zone Alarm.
