Zone Alarm Pro

Q : I have an anti-virus installed in my PC, do I really need a firewall? What is it? How it works and how does it protect my PC?

A : Yes, Anti-Virus Software alone is not enough to protect your computer today. After an Anti-Virus software is installed in your computer, the limitation of it is, you can only detect the virus and heal it if the virus is found, or if the virus is in you computer; Firewall protect your computer by building a defense line in front of you computer before an unauthorized connection is made by hackers or intruders. Most anti-virus software suite today like kaspersky internet security suite included a firewall in their product. A firewall's basic task is to regulate some of the flow of traffic between computer networks of different trust levels (Wikipedia, 2008).

If you have been using the internet for quite some time, you must have heard of firewall. "Firewall is defined as : A system designed to prevent unauthorized access to or from a private network. Firewalls can be implemented in both hardware and software, or a combination of both. Firewalls are frequently used to prevent unauthorized Internet users from accessing private networks connected to the Internet, especially intranets. All messages entering or leaving the intranet pass through the firewall, which examines each message and blocks those that do not meet the specified security criteria" (Webopedia,2004).

Q: Why do we need firewall security?
A: Because there are many ways that people can use to access or abuse unprotected computers (Tyson, 2008). Firewall is one ways to prevent them. For example firewall can protect you from remote login. Firewall can also prevent you from Application backdoors; some virus or software might provide backdoors for hackers. Using a firewall can also prevent keyloggers software to send out the keystroke that have been captured by the software. There are many more reasons why firewall is needed and what it can do, click on the website link at the bottom of the page(reference) for more information about firewall.

Now, let's go back to out topic today, Zone Alarm Pro.
Q: Why Zone Alarm?
A: Zone Alarm Pro is software based firewall that is suitable for home users who want to extend their computer's security. Zone Alarm Pro is a very user friendly firewall software; anyone who understands English can use it without problem. Installing and setting up Zone Alarm Pro is easy. If have experience using computers, another firewall that i would recommend is Comodo Firewall Pro, stronger protection but complicated especially with the "Image Execution Prevention". In Zone Alarm it is call "program control" which is much more easier to manage and easy to configure. Similar to 'Image Execution Prevention'.

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Reference:

1. Webopedia, 2004, 'Firewall', online, date accessed 20th October 2008. Available from: http://www.zonealarm.com/store/content/home.jsp
2. Tyson, J. 2008, 'How Firewall Works', online, date accessed 20th October 2008. Available from: http://computer.howstuffworks.com/firewall3.htm
3. Wikipedia, 2008, 'Firewall', date accessed 20th October 2008. Available from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firewall