TESTED. REVIEWED. VERDICTIZED reviews
L
ooking for cheap security for your PC?
Zone Labs’ ZoneAlarm firewall is avail
able free for the downloading, as is
Grisoft’s AVG antivirus, Safer-Networking’s
Spybot anti-spyware, and Spampal.org’s
anti-spam software. But if you’re looking for
an integrated solution offering all these safe-
guards and more, ZoneAlarm Internet Security
Suite 6.5 justifies its price.
And unlike some other vendors in
this market segment
McAfee
Labs doesn’t start harassing you for a sub-
scription-renewal fee on the anniversary date
of your purchase.
This version of ZoneAlarm Internet
Security Suite (let’s call it ZASS) has several
new features, including automatic spy-site
blocking, a gaming mode, and something the
company touts as an identity-theft protection
service that protects you “even in the physical
world.” This last claim is fulfilled by a one-
year enrollment in a third-party service called
Identity Guard Card Theft Protection, billed as
“a $29.95 value!”
When you’re delivered to this third-party’s
website (www.identityguard.com) indirectly
from ZASS, you’re entreated to also sign
up for one of the company’s other products
with this message: “...for more complete
identity protection, the ZoneAlarm team rec-
ommends upgrading to Identity Guard Fraud
Protection....” This service costs nearly three
times what you’ll pay for ZASS.
With the free service, you register your
credit cards and the company’s web-crawl-
ers—which troll sites known to trade in
stolen credit-card numbers—will notify you if
yours pop up. So what’s not to like? Identity
Guard feels like a come-on: bait to lure you
into signing up for the higher-priced prod-
uct. But if you do find it to be of value, Zone
Labs tells us it plans to continue to offer
the basic service for free to customers who
renew their ZASS subscriptions.
Enough about that; let’s get back to
some of the new features of the core prod-
uct. Few things are more annoying than
being interrupted in the middle a game by
some specious alert from a program that’s
running on your PC. ZASS now includes a
game mode that automatically suppresses
the program’s alerts that require you to
make a decision. It also suspends automatic
scans and program updates.
Zone Labs has also added a known spy-
ware site-blocking feature to ZASS. Should
you try to visit one of these sites, or should a
spyware program running on your PC attempt
to phone home to one, ZASS will automatically
block the visit and display an alert. Labeling
applications or websites as sources of spyware
can be problematic, and ZASS cuts vendors
a lot of slack in this regard: In a quick test, the
program prevented us from visiting http://www.gator.
com, but not the P2P file-sharing site http://www.
limewire.com or even http://www.eacceleration.com,
whose application the program had previously
identified as spyware.
On the other hand, ZASS spyware scan
did turn up two Windows registry entries
from programs we had purged from our test
platform eons ago: StopSign, from the afore-
mentioned eAcceleration, and PartyPoker
(installed purely in the name of research—
honest!). Several other popular anti-spyware
programs, including Spybot, had failed to
detect these entries.
This latest iteration of Zone AlarmSecurity Suite offers thorough protection
for your PC at a reasonable price. The
program’s better-safe-than-sorry alert mes-
sages will startle novices, but experienced
users will take them in stride while custom-
izing the program for their environment.
—MICHAEL BROWNZoneAlarm Internet Security
Suite 6.5
Online security, from soup to nuts
Although ZoneAlarm has evolved and
expanded over the years, its unconventional
but surprisingly effective user interface
hasn’t changed much at all.The spyware scanner unearthed two bits of
code left behind by long-uninstalled applica-
tions. Several other anti-spyware programs
had failed to detect these applications.$70, http://www.zonelabs.comZONEALARM SECURITY SUITEINSTALLING A FIREWALL
Jam-packed with well-inte-
grated security features.INSTALLING DRYWALL^9
Third-party credit-card
protection is of dubious value.SEPTEMBER 2006 MA XIMUMPC 89
“SmartDefense Advisor” is supposed
to distinguish genuine threats from the
benign behavior of desirable software, but
it has a propensity to label nearly every-
thing as suspicious.