Product Reviews

As most PCs need protection from both hackers and viruses, it makes absolute sense to combine the products into one all-encompassing package. Norton and F-Secure have both already led the way here, and Zone Labs has sensibly joined its rivals with an all-in-one suite. The question is whether Security Suite, which combines a software firewall with anti-virus technology, web-content filtering, privacy protection, ad blocking, IM security and identity theft prevention, is good enough to regain ZoneAlarm its place on our A List.

Once installed, we immediately noticed that CPU resources are kept under control, although Agnitum's Outpost still outperforms ZoneAlarm in this regard. The 9MB of RAM consumed by ZoneAlarm is minimal, and in use there's no general performance slowdown when emailing or browsing the Internet. The simple elegance of the integrated ZoneAlarm control panel enables less confident users to see what the program is doing to protect them on a 'fire-and-forget' basis. At the same time, those with more experience can quickly get into the technical nitty gritty and configure every component to their own requirements, without wasting time drilling down through multiple interface layers.

If you want to turn off the Computer Associates' Vet anti-virus component and continue to run your own preferred solution then you can, and ZoneAlarm will monitor these anti-virus defences and alerts you if updates aren't downloaded (provided you use an application supported by Computer Associates, McAfee, Norton or Trend Micro). You must uninstall any existing anti-virus solution before running the Security Suite AV component though, or system instability will hit you where it hurts. This makes things a little tedious if you just want to trial it, but luckily the anti-virus component is excellent - having won the Virus Bulletin VB100 award for the past four years in its original guise. You get on-demand and scheduled scanning, on-access scanning and protection for both in and outbound email including attachments (IMAP4 isn't supported though) with automated updates.

Web-content filtering remains top class, using the remote Cerberian servers to deal with filter data and providing more than 30 configurable categories. The lack of a 'per user' option is our only gripe here. Old functionality friends, such as MailSafe, remain:

Others have been tweaked a little, such as the firewall alerts. An Automatic Program Configuration feature, similar to that in Norton Personal Firewall, scans Internet-facing apps and matches them to a database of more than 10,000 files, so you get less of the 'generic host process' alerts as a result.

When you do see an alert, AlertAdvisor can be called up using the More Info button. This employs a set of 'Hacker ID' utilities, essentially WHOIS linked to graphical IP mapping and an integrated event-reporting feature. Unlike many such utilities that are nothing but eye candy, this one is useful in finding out more detail about would-be hackers - especially the reporting of inbound event information for further analysis and escalation to the host ISP for action if required. The integration of IMSecure, which protects the user from IM spam (SPIM), is brand new.

Instant Messages for the main players (including AIM, MSN, Trillian, Yahoo! and some smaller clients) are encrypted but only if both users have either the Security Suite or have IMSecure installed. Readers of our recent ID Theft feature (see issue 116, p134) will be pleased to know that an 'information vault' encrypts and stores the personal data you want it to, and any subsequent entering of that information online prompts ZoneAlarm to ask if you want the destination URL added to your trusted sites list or blocked. This protection also extends to IM sessions where protected data is replaced by a series of asterisks in the conversation. Anything that helps prevent key-loggers from grabbing your data is okay by us.

One word of warning though. Installation problems are an issue if you use ICS to share the network Internet connection, as ZoneAlarm no longer asks 'Is this machine an ICS gateway?'. This results in client machines being unable to access the Internet without tedious manual tweaking.

So if you've already bought into someone else's anti-virus solution, do you need to change? Not really - Agnitum Outpost Firewall Pro 2.1 is a perfectly good standalone firewall, and it's cheaper. Furthermore, with an all-in-one approach, if you need to turn off the firewall (as happens occasionally when compatibility problems rear their heads) you also lose anti-virus protection when you need it most. At less than £50, however, ZoneAlarm represents good value despite the recurring subscription costs (£20 per year).

If you have a valid ZoneAlarm Pro with Web Filtering subscription, then the remainder of this will be transferred into Security Suite. The same, however, does not apply for basic ZoneAlarm Pro users who will lose any remaining subscription time. To answer our original question regarding the A List, despite some minor niggles ZoneAlarm Security Suite provides more protection for your money than the competition: it deserves to be back on top.