Your personal firewall, don’t leave home without one!
June 21, 2006
Is your computer protected against the Internet bad guys? You don’t need to be a computer expert to keep your files safe from the outside world. The Internet is awash with plenty of people – and computer programs – that are constantly searching for vulnerable computers such as yours. Once they find them, they can become compromised and used by the bad guys to launch attacks on others, what are called zombies and bot nets. You don’t want to join the zombie league, and surveys have shown all it takes is for you to be online for about 10 minutes before your computer can become compromised.
In this podcast, I talk about what you can do to prevent this from happening, and where you can get your own personal firewall.
Check out ZoneAlarm for the best Windows firewall. And here is where you can download Service Pack 2 for Windows XP. And how you can set up your Mac’s firewall.
Your Personal Geek 
August 16, 2010 at 1:22 am
David,
Unfortunately, the founders of ZonAlarm have long left the company. The new management made business decisions I am not comfortable with, including passing traffic through their own DNS servers.
I believe the most reliable, fastest OLD version of ZoneAlarm was V2.6
This strange and alarming practice has been documented and mentioned on Steve Gibson’s weekly podcast Security Now, episiode 175.
In replacement, I found value in using other light-weight releases:
Outpost (64bit!)
Nod32 Smart Security (64bit!)
Most security suites really slow computers down, but these have not slowed my newer windows machines at all, in my experience.
If you are running older versions of Windows, like XP, you can grab the free OLDER versions from old software archives;
Tinywall,
Outpost ,
Comodo (v3.0.25.378) and
Kerio (v4.3.26.81) (which became sunbelt, which is now vipre and I have never used these newer editions)
NOTE: If you DO choose to run older versions of software, remember to NEVER update.