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Tuesday, December 4, 2007

ZoneAlarm


ZoneAlarm is a software firewall originally developed by Zone Labs, which was acquired in 2003 by Check Point. It includes an inbound intrusion detection system, as well as the ability to control which programs can create outbound connection — the latter is not available in the Windows XP Service Pack 2 firewall. Their newest release is ZoneAlarm 7.1 which is the first version to be compatible with the Microsoft Windows Vista operating system[1].

In ZoneAlarm, program access is controlled by way of "zones" which the computer's network connections are divided up into. The "trusted zone" generally includes the user's Local Area Network and can share resources such as files and printers, while the "Internet zone" includes everything not in the trusted zone. The user can specify which "permissions" (trusted zone client, trusted zone server, Internet zone client, Internet zone server) to give to a program before it attempts to access the Internet (e.g. before running it for the first time) or, alternatively, ZoneAlarm will ask the user to give the program permission on its first access attempt.

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