Zone Alarm Pro 3.0 Review

By Mike Lloret

I've been using Zone Labs' Zone Alarm--the free version for individual, private users--on my computers since Ralph Sumner wrote glowingly about it in the newsletter quite a while back. I know that lots of other TPC folks have been, too. I'd been happy with this security utility and firewall, had no special trouble installing or upgrading it, and was pleased enough that I was planning to buy the Pro version soon, mostly because I wanted to get back the ability to trace the origins of unwanted attempts on my systems, which is now available only in the Pro version.

Thus I jumped at the chance to review the newly released Pro 3.0 when Ken Cotton pointed one of the Zone Labs marketing people to me as the AJ editor. I'll let you find out the basics of what Zone Alarm does by reading Ralph's article in the AJ archives or by reading any of the many reviews--most of them highly positive, and rightly so--on the internet. My intention, in this article and in some brief follow-ups over the next couple of months, either in separate articles or in my Midnight Writer column, is to let you know what it is about the Pro version that makes it worth buying, when you can get the excellent and very functional free-for-individual-use version just by downloading it.

First of all, a brief rundown on my computers and how I use them. For work I've been given a Compaq Armada E500 notebook PC I've christened Twilight, and when I'm in the office it's online by dial-up connection through its internal modem pretty much all day. When I'm at home it's plugged into a wired LAN, together with Basilisk, my homemade P3 desktop system; another notebook PC; another desktop; a scanner and a couple of printers; and one of my old machines that's been given a new lease on life as a kind of gateway/file server/pseudo- router, connected to a cable modem; plus one more recently added PC connected to the LAN by wireless connection, physically located in a building across the street. So, from a security point of view, I need to be online pretty much all the time, sometimes with as many as six machines in the network, and to be able to shift files around among and to run apps, browse and do email from several machines at once, but to exclude Internet intruders. I'll discuss the other machines' roles sometime, but right now I'd like to focus on how Zone Alarm relates to the Twilight and Basilisk machines, the former sometimes networked and sometimes not, the latter always networked.

Now, ZoneAlarm Pro lets you secure your computer quickly and easily so that the trusted machines with which you're networked can access your shared resources, but Internet intruders can't use your shares to compromise your system. To configure ZoneAlarm Pro for secure sharing, all you have to do is:

• Add the network subnet (or, in a small network, the IP address of each computer with which you're sharing the network) to your Trusted Zone.
• Set the Trusted Zone security level to Medium. This setting allows trusted computers to access your shared files.
• Set Internet Zone security level to High. This setting makes your computer invisible to non-trusted machines.

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