ZoneAlarm Pro 3 Software

Average Rating:

I love this software! It is easy to install and easy to understand for us novices. It also works - very well. I can't begin to count the number of times I have been "pinged" every time I go online. It blocks all attempts and tells me, in a pop-up window, the type of access attempt and the originating IP. It tells me when a program on my computer is trying to access the Internet. It has pop-up ad blocking, cookie control, hacker tracing, zone-based blocking and more. Without a firewall, you might be amazed at all the info the outside world can get to on your computer. Install ZoneAlarm Pro 3, and notice the difference in the test. With ZoneAlarm Pro 3 I passed these tests with flying colors!

Other reviews of this software listed here are less than complimentary and I don't understand why. I have never had any problems with ZoneAlarm Pro 3. Keep in mind, however, that I bought the boxed version, not the downloadable version; that may be the difference. This software comes with 1-year free online support. After that you have to pay for each additional year but you will need to do this in order to get the updates. Again, I recommend ZoneAlarm Pro 3 and please note that it is Windows XP compatible.

What I found out really surprised me. As it turned out, my current firewall software wasn't offering me the protection that I had hoped for. It did a pretty good job for the most part, but it came up short in a few key areas, such as the ability to "stealth my computer's ports (In plain talk, this simply means that my computer can "hide from those who mean to do it harm" so to speak, while online). Zone Alarm, on the other hand passed with flying colors. My ports were now hidden from prying eyes.

Needless to say, my old firewall was shown the door. Since this time my computer has been as dependable as it ever was (show me an operating system that doesn't act up from time to time), and I can honestly say that I'm quite pleased with the peace of mind that Zone Alarm has given me. No software is "foolproof", but this one sure comes pretty close. I give it my highest recommendation, and I feel no computer should be without it.

No. (1) is probably the most noteworthy security addition, but its usefulness depends on the programs you run. It lets you explicitly specifies which TCP or UDP port(s) an application can or cannot use. In the free version, you can only allow an application to use either all or none of the ports (which, admittedly, is good enough for most applications). Some users may find it useful to allow certain ports, while also disallow other ones, that an application can use. For instance, if you run a mail server that offers POP3 and SMTP services, you may want to enable port 110 and 25 while disabling port 143, which is normally for IMAP service that is not always used by mail servers. Also, port configurations must be associated with an application. There is no "global" port configurations available in ZAPro. You are not able to configure a port for all applications. Before you can configure ports, you must add the application to the program list.

(2) and (4) are content-control features that let you control acceptance of cookies and active content. It lets you accept or refuse temporary or permanent cookies, and enable or disable "mobile code" -- scripts, embedded objects, and MIME-type integrated objects. One major plus is you can configure these settings for EACH WEB SITE, which is something you can't do in most browsers. For example, you can enable permanent cookies only for those web sites that require them to function properly; you can disable mobile code for sites that may use harmful scripts; you can set different cookie expiration times for different sites; and so on. There is a "site list" that shows the settings of every site. Every time you go to a new web site, its domain name appears on the site list, so you can modify its settings on the fly. Best of all, even third-party sites appear on the site list, which is useful in dealing with third-party advertising sites that force their way into your browsers (often in the form of pop-up ads).

Some reviewers wrote that ZAPro's ad-blocking feature doesn't work all the time, and pop-up ads are not often blocked. The truth is that advertisers use a variety of ways to create pop-up ads, and I suspect ZAPro's ad-blocking feature cannot catch them all. Some web pages use scripts to create pop-up ads, and you need to disable mobile code in ZAPro in order to block them. Some use cookies to "tell" the web page when to create pop-up ads, and you need to disable cookies. Therefore, you really need to configure DIFFERENT settings for different web sites in ZAPro to deal with them. As mentioned in the last paragraph, this is exactly what ZAPro lets you do.

ZAPro also has the so-called Advanced Mailsafe feature that "quarantines" e-mail attachments. Don't be fooled; this is a useless feature. All it does is RENAME the file extension of the attachments. An e-mail attachment named SETUP.EXE would be renamed to SETUP.ZLn (where n would be from 0 to 9). The problem is obvious: to truly prevent viruses coming out of an e-mail attachment, you need a VIRUS SCANNER. And ZAPro isn't one. Simply renaming the file doesn't solve the problem. Also, after the file is renamed, you are not told what the original file extension was, and you have to open up the ZA log to find out, which is inconvenient. This is poorly designed, poorly implemented feature.

Speaking of the ZA logs, be sure to back them up and read them regularly. They are text files that can be renamed to CSV files so you can import them to a worksheet or database for easier viewing. From the logs, find out which of your ports were probed most frequently, which ones were not probed AT ALL (perhaps ZAPro didn't detect any probe because the ports were WIDE OPEN!), which originating IP addresses have probed your machine the most often, etc. My logs from the last five months show that among the 4000-plus probes detected by ZAPro (which comes to about 20 a day), TCP port 1433 were probed 3000-plus times! (Port 1433 is normally used by Microsoft SQL Server. I do have a MS SQL Server, but it's behind the firewall and invisible from the internet. Also, the popular firewall-testing web site grc.com DOESN'T check port 1433.)

My conclusion is the ZAPro's additional feature are a mixed bag, and they don't justify the additional price.

One last thing is that even though the system requirements don't explicitly say so, ZA and ZAPro do run on Windows 95 (I tested it on OSR2).