Lab

Personal Firewalls

Internet security has never been more important. Long gone are the days when spotty youths programmed in the dark for their own amusement, creating viruses and worms just for the sake of it. Now they do it for money, and if you don't have protection, you'll be a pawn in their criminal enterprises.

In March the national press reported that the British are a nation of zombies. According to Symantec, we lead the world in owning PCs that are infected with evil programs. These programs allow attackers to control your PC remotely, turning them into so-called zombies. As a zombie, your computer becomes part of a global network known as a botnet. Imagine an army of mindless, relatively weak individuals under the control of a single mastermind. This adds up to a powerful force. Many anti-virus companies believe that these networks are used to do the bidding of criminals. PCs can be ordered to send huge amounts of spam email or launch attacks against business websites that refuse to pay blackmail demands.

To stop these people taking over your PC, you need a firewall. Anti-virus software helps (see our review of anti-virus programs in Shopper, February 2005) and anti-spam programs reduce the amount of junk email you receive, but without a firewall you may as well forget about connecting to the internet. Your PC will be hijacked in minutes.

Service Pack 2 for Windows XP includes an updated Windows firewall. The original was tricky to configure, so if you needed to allow incoming connections, perhaps to enable internet messaging software, you had your work cut out. The new version protects your PC during boot time, which the older one didn't. An Exceptions list allows you to choose which programs can accept connections initiated from the internet easily, and it has a mode that disables these Exceptions temporarily. This last feature is handy if you sometimes connect to the net from a public network, such as a WiFi hotspot.

Although it's better than the original Windows Internet Connection Firewall (ICF), it still doesn't check which programs are allowed to make a connection out to the internet. We think this application control feature is important, so the ICF won't cut the mustard on its own. Luckily, all the firewalls tested here provide application control.

We've tested a wide range of firewall programs, as well as a few security packages that combine a firewall with anti-virus software. These are often very good value, although sometimes you'll find one component is stronger than the other - which is why we've provided separate firewall and overall ratings for these. Together with the anti-virus test we ran in the February issue, this set of reviews will help you decide what combination you need.