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Secure clients with ZoneAlarm

• Tags:
• Traffic Filtering,
• Virus Detection,
• Security,
• Zonelabs

Ray Geroski

Published: 23 May 2002 12:48 BST

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Program control
ZoneAlarm Pro's Program Control feature also provides a slider you can use to set security to High, Medium, Low, or Off. At the default value of Medium, programs must request permission to access the Internet (Figure E). When I attempted to use IE to access the Internet after installing ZoneAlarm Pro, for example, I was prompted with an alert asking whether this operation should be allowed. In this case, I opted to give IE permission to always be allowed to access the Internet.

At the Low setting, ZoneAlarm Pro eventually 'learns' which programs use the Internet and stops prompting you about whether a program should be able to perform Internet-related functions. The Off setting bypasses the Program Control feature altogether.

At the High setting, all programs must be authenticated before they are given permission to access the Internet. If this isn't enough, you can also click on the Custom button and select specific programs yourself to set their permissions. ZoneAlarm Pro seems to have covered this pretty well with its built-in learning and permissions system, but if you are configuring systems for users on your network, the customization feature could be a valuable feature for controlling what users can and can't do on the Internet.

There's also an Internet Lock feature that, when activated, blocks all Internet traffic to and from the system when your screen saver kicks in or after a specified length of time.

E-mail options
ZoneAlarm Pro's e-mail protection simply consists of specifying the file attachment types you want to block. By default, ZoneAlarm Pro blocks attachments of various types, including files with the following extensions:

• .exe
• .bat
• .chm
• .mdb
• .hlp

The list is comprehensive and covers everything that would be suspect. If you want to allow users to exchange certain types of files, you can easily click on a type and select Allow. If you want to allow attachments of all types, you can click Clear All.

Overall, ZoneAlarm Pro's security options are extensive and easy to manage. The slider bars make it easy to defer to Zone Labs' judgment on what should and should not be allowed, but you can also use the Custom buttons on any of the settings if you want to make your own call on certain settings.

The minuses
One drawback to using ZoneAlarm Pro as a security solution is that it offers no virus-detection and removal features. Granted, it's not really designed to do this, but other available security products can alert users to possible virus threats and even block some of them. ZoneAlarm Pro's security solution is one of permissions rather than threat detection and removal. Depending on how you run things, this could be good or bad.

Admins who want to have granular control over which activities are allowed on their networks will appreciate what ZoneAlarm Pro offers from the desktop firewall standpoint. But many users might look at it as a tool for network dictators. Even with the High-Low settings, this program is built around the idea of disallowing certain activities.

ZoneAlarm Pro also appears to have some redundancy in its settings that results in its not always responding to traffic as you'd expect based on your settings. Either that, or this is one stubborn watchdog that refuses to allow certain types of traffic, regardless of selected options to the contrary.

For example, I kept receiving alerts regarding NetBIOS sessions, traffic I had decided to allow. ZoneAlarm Pro insisted on blocking all NetBIOS sessions, outgoing and incoming, even though I had not selected any blocking for them. None of the settings I selected would make it stop blocking NetBIOS.

I was also annoyed by the constant alerts. I could have turned them off, but I was concerned that ZoneAlarm Pro might be stubbornly preventing traffic I wanted to allow. So it seems the program might have some issues with custom-selected security overrides. The other solution here is to drop the security setting down a notch and then specify the custom settings based on the lower security level.

Final verdict
ZoneAlarm Pro is a full-featured personal firewall program that offers admins a powerful client firewall for controlling Internet-related activities on their networks. It could be especially valuable for setting up on laptops for mobile workers and for recommending for home users who connect to the office via VPN. Of course, some admins will want to put a copy of ZoneAlarm on all their desktops to regulate Internet usage.

Because of the many security options it offers, ZoneAlarm represents another good tool for admins who want to have greater control over what enters and leaves their networks to and from the Internet. Although it lacks virus-detection features and is definitely not a substitute for full-featured desktop virus solutions, its ability to block various types of traffic and files will give networks an added and valuable security measure.

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Go to section: Secure clients with ZoneAlarm Page 2: Tutorial and Firewall Page 3: Program control, email and summary

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