Product Reviews

On the surface, Preventon's new Personal Firewall Pro 1.1 doesn't look that different from its consumer sibling Personal Firewall 2. However, the Pro version is apparently aimed at both the SME and large enterprise market - quite bold for an application costing £21, especially when competing with well-established players such as Symantec Norton Personal Firewall 2003.

A quick look at the default setup, though, soon suggests that Preventon is battling too hard to be all things to all markets, including the consumer. As a corporate customer I'd be less than impressed by options such as Allow Web or Allow Email. A Fire and Forget mode is undoubtedly a godsend for the average consumer, but more advanced users will feel slightly on edge with this 'hide the mechanics' approach.

You do, however, get a greater degree of control once you switch from the default Universal mode to the Custom mode. The Allow Web nonsense is then replaced with filtering by IP address and port tables, which you enter yourself. Program access control is handled by either adding entries manually, or by letting Preventon configure the access options on the fly - it pops up an alert whenever a new application wants to access the Internet. However, we still prefer the Norton scan-upon-installation approach, which prepares a complete list of Internet-enabled software,

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and assigns default settings to each app, which you can change as required.

Preventon's interceptions-log is kept simple, showing just the time, date, nature of interception (inbound or outbound) and the number of attempts. Double-clicking an entry pops up a little more detail, such as the protocol and port number, but that's pretty much it. It works; it passed our standard battery of hack-attack tests, and it cloaks your ports in stealth mode as well as any other software firewall too.

This is all well and good, but Preventon faces a major problem - mainly that the software firewall category in this price bracket is already well populated by established players. Breaking into this market in any meaningful way will be difficult unless a product can bring something truly innovate or new to the table, and Preventon Personal Firewall Pro 1.1 doesn't. There's little, other than its UK development origins, to recommend this product over free offerings such as Zone Labs ZoneAlarm and Agnitum's Outpost, both of which provide equally flexible and simple protection for free.

The main concern, however, is that this product is aimed specifically at a market sector that should be investing in a hardware firewall for truly grown-up protection. These provide stateful inspection of packets below network level, which ensures that each packet is checked against, and actioned, upon the firewall rule base. Software firewalls, however, operate above the network layer. So while they provide good levels of protection, they can't be thought of as totally secure.

Charging £21 for an enterprise level software firewall was a brave move from Preventon, but we ultimately can't recommend such a product for corporate use. And, while software firewalls make an easy security option for the less knowledgeable consumer, we still recommend Symantec Norton Personal Firewall 2003 as our current personal software firewall of choice.