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Office applications Toolkit

Secure clients with ZoneAlarm

Ray Geroski Tech Republic

Published: 23 May 2002 12:48 BST

ZoneAlarm Pro 3.0, from Zone Labs, can help you secure client machines from Internet threats and control access to the Internet and specific URLs.

Installation and setup
ZoneAlarm Pro installs in a snap and then launches into the Configuration Wizard, which lets you configure the security options you want to use.

The first option allows you to choose whether to activate ZoneAlarm Pro's privacy control (Figure A), which allows you to block pop-up ads, banner ads, and third-party cookies. If you don't activate the option during the install, you can do so later via the Privacy link in the program GUI.

Next, the wizard prompts you to select the types of blocked traffic for which you want to view alerts. The default option is Alert Me Only When Blocked Traffic Is Probably Hacker Activity. You can also opt to be notified of all blocked traffic or not to receive these alerts at all.

Figure A

Privacy switch can block annoying ads as well as cookies.

You can guard your specified security settings by specifying a password controlling access to ZoneAlarm Pro (Figure B). If you set a password, configuration decisions and changes will prompt for the password. This could be helpful for admins who want to deploy this firewall on end-user systems and set up a strong security configuration without having to worry about the user being able to fiddle with the settings.

Figure B

Set a password to protect security settings.

ZoneAlarm also prompts you to either allow it to preconfigure Internet access permissions for your applications or to set those preferences yourself (Figure C). Curiously, even though ZoneAlarm Pro indicates that it will preconfigure Internet access for such applications as Internet Explorer, I found that the first time I used IE after the initial setup, I was still prompted to give or deny IE permission to access the Internet.

Figure C

ZoneAlarm can preconfigure browser access permissions.

The final panel of the setup wizard lets you either launch or skip the program's tutorial and launch ZoneAlarm Pro.

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