Labs

Kerio Personal Firewall was recently bought by Sunbelt, which promptly halved the price. We haven't reviewed this standalone firewall before, so we were intrigued to see how it would stand up to the established competition.

It turns out that this is a seriously good personal firewall for the money. Not only does it make a decent effort of deflecting unwanted traffic, it does so without scaring the user. When it detects an incoming port scan, for example, it doesn't pop up useless alerts. Instead it registers the attack on a counter so you can see how

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many hackers have included you in their random scanning.

Managing applications is straightforward. The well-designed interface is virtually identical to the one found in ZoneAlarm. Its levels of control are much more powerful, though, and it is relatively easy to add proper firewall rules to fine-tune access to any server applications you want to run. Using these we were able to allow access only to IIS's web services.

It's not all good news, though. Despite its network IDS, it didn't report any of our web probes. That is disappointing but relevant only to users who want to allow incoming access to services running on their PCs.

Kerio Personal Firewall also has a range of privacy features, including cookie management and a system that prevents your most sensitive data being entered into forms on websites. This is useful if you want to stop your kids using your credit card on the internet. You'll need to use the firewall's password feature to prevent local users changing your settings.

With its good range of features, simple interface and a great price, Kerio is our preferred standalone firewall for those on a budget.