Product Reviews

A software firewall has to really stand out to succeed in the crowded market, but ZoneAlarm Pro 3.5 with Web Filtering does just that, and not just because of its long-winded name. ZoneLabs almost single-handedly created this genre, but early generations proved unstable on some setups, including my own. I revisited version 3 with some trepidation, but discovered a stable and impressive product. An upgrade later, and ZoneAlarm Pro 3.5 has become part of that rare breed - a modern software classic.

This firewall easily beats both previous A List holders (Norton and BlackICE) for ease of setup, flexibility of configuration and real-world maturity. All you have to do is accept the secure defaults and follow the Wizards, or you can get your hands dirty in the configuration files according to your ability and confidence.

Like Norton Personal Firewall 2003 (see Reviews, issue 100, p152), ZoneAlarm scans for existing Internet-enabled applications and allocates trust levels accordingly. What's more, every new program trying to access the outside world will throw up a prompt to allow Internet access once, always or never.

New in this release are increased authentication of low-level security coding - making it more resilient against hijacking - and a hardening of the program control code to provide protection from theoretical dangers. The latter is best demonstrated

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by the TooLeaky exploit, which circumvents outbound packet filtering by exploiting web browser vulnerabilities.

Then there's the fingerprinting of application components, which protects the user against the next generation of Remote Access Trojans that pretend to be legitimate software. However, I was drawn towards the new Automatic Network Detection Wizard, which makes setting up network protection a three-step process, and throws in wireless network detection and instant naming management too.

But ZoneAlarm Pro really starts to move ahead of the competition with the amount of information provided about alerts. You can either ignore alerts or track them down using a trace function, which automatically takes you to the relevant details waiting at the ZoneLabs website.

Once you've played around with ZoneAlarm for a bit, you start to appreciate its finer touches of functionality. If you want an email-checking system to automatically rename and quarantine potentially dangerous attachments, you've got it. If you want a totally integrated web content filtering component, which offers parental control, access configuration and intelligent site/service blocking you've got that as well.

There's even intelligent ad filtering thrown in, which has a useful feature to only block ads that take more than a defined time to load. This is just as welcome as the ability to block banners, pop-ups or animations separately. Put it all together, and you soon start to appreciate why this is the undisputed heavyweight champion of software firewalls.

ZoneAlarm is more than just a personal firewall, and while large businesses should invest in hardware-based protection, there's still plenty of room for a mature, network-friendly software application to fill the gap between the home user and corporate enterprise. That application is ZoneAlarm Pro 3.5 with Web Filtering - it costs £31, but it stands out from the crowd for all the right reasons.