Zone Alarm Pro 6 - beyond firewall !!
With its latest offering in its range of highly acclaimed Internet Security Suites, Zone Labs has taken Zonealarm Pro beyond your average ordinary firewall. Now, Zonealarm Pro carries a spyware scanner, features that monitor changes to the registry, and access to other resources, a key logger detector and a few more. All in all, this means that Zonealarm 6 has some pretty useful features, if you know how to handle them.
- Anti-Spyware : ZoneAlarm 6 professional now features an anti-spyware tool, but Zone Labs’ expertise in this area is doubted as they are new to the market. Bad spyware software can do you a lot of harm. For example, one of Microsoft AntiSpyware’s first versions removed my full version of FlashGet, despite it not having ads, and not being illegally cracked. A similar pattern was observed with Zonealarm’s spyware tool where it detectedShareaza as a threat despite it having being open-source and completely spyware-free.
- System Monitoring : Zonealarm now tracks changes to the registry and this is a powerful little tool if you observe carefully what is being shown. For example, if a program tries to insert a key that will allow it to start at every boot, you will be asked before that is allowed. Similarly, the feature monitors other critical registry areas as well. You are also warned and asked for permission if an application tries to access important system files.
- Anti-Keylogger : In my opinion, this is the best addition to the suite. This is the first anti-keylogger I’ve come across from a reliable brand, and it’s pretty accurate too. It was tested with several types of keyloggers commonly available on the internet and came out trumps in all the tests. Once again, you should know how to use this feature, since it normally catches MSN or Yahoo messenger because they are set to record all conversations by default.
Concluding, I would say that ZoneAlarm 6 is a 30% improvement over the previous versions, and deserves 4.25/5 in my book. It’s a winner !
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The security software companies are doing it all same now, offering a complete suite that besides a firewall, also include an anti-spyware/malware, an anti-virus etc. Serves them better(to the company I mean) this way, instead of selling individual softwares(hardly anyone one would buy all), they sell them all in a bundle!! Otherwise anyone would be idiot to buy McAfee’s anti-spyware etc.
If I were to buy them, I’d rather buy them individually to get the best, Norton or TrendMicro for anti-virus, Adaware for anti-spyware and ZoneAlarm for firewall!!
but ZA is really well integrated, ulike other who install these compontents seperately, and link them through a control centere.
In ZA, they can’t be seperated.
well, in my experience, the integration is not that important for a home user & its not that difficult either. Usually, the firewall(ZoneAlarm) automatically detects the anti-virus software, besides, if you’ve real-time disk protection enabled in your anti-virus & the firewall is on, you don’t need them to integrate, they can do their own work just fine, and people hardly run anti-spyware/malware softwares like AdAware more than once a week!!