Firewall software


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I am thinking about getting a firewall software.  Which one should I get???

Are many out there and the ones below are top of the bunch.

Zonealarm

Sygate

Edited by Davey
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Kerio Personal Firewall v2.1.5 is my personal favourite, and it's free for personal use. It's extremely fast, has a sleek interface and is very easy to set up and maintain. The newer betas (v3 didn't even make it to final) are crap as far as I'm concerned, what with all the bloat, plugins and stuff that I don't really need (the ability in KFP v4 to group your packet filters is nice, though - makes it easier to sort through your rules quickly if you have a lot of them).

XP's firewall is of course a simple way to get some additional security without additional software. Your choice, really, but I don't believe XP's firewall is as secure as any of the free competitors (and certainly not as safe as KPF or F-Secure's Distributed Firewall!)

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I really like Norton Personal firewall.

On the surface it works application based like Zonealarm, but if you dig deeper into it you can actually set exactly what ports each application uses which you can't do with zonealarm. Ontop of that it also has intrusion detection, which is kind of like anti virus signatures except for internet attacks, so it can tell you what you're being hit with. That said the IDS is kinda paranoid and can be wrong but I like having it to have it.

But for a free firewall I like Kerio the best. Zonealarm has gotten to big, and each newer version I play with seems a little worse than the one before it so I think they're going in the wrong direction.

Sygate personal firewall is another free one that I think works great and is easy on the system resources.

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BY all means use XPs built in firewall... but honestly its a fair attempt by MS to give the user some added protection BUT it doesnt go far enough, it will stop incomming data packets BUT WILL NOT stop outgoing packets so if you are foolish or just plain unlucky to contract a nasty ( virus, trojan etc ) then they will still send info out from your PC.

So its best to use one of the above like ZA or Kerio as they will block outgoing data and will also alert you to whats asking for access to the internet ( this is a good thing IMO as for one I like to know what programs are wanting to access the net ), if more people would have had these then Blaster for one would have been noticed asking for net access!

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