বৃহস্পতিবার, ১০ জানুয়ারী, ২০১৩

Outpost Firewall Pro 8


Back in the day, every self-respecting computer geek installed a personal firewall for protection against attack by hackers. These days Windows itself includes an effective firewall, and many users get their firewall protection as part of a security suite, or as a bonus feature in an antivirus. As a standalone personal firewall embellished with numerous tools for ?ber-geeks, Outpost Firewall Pro 8 ($29.95 direct; $39.95 for three licenses) seems a bit retro.

Outpost Firewall Pro bears a very strong resemblance to Outpost Antivirus Pro 8, and in fact quite a few features overlap. Both offer self-protection, Auto-Learn mode, and an Entertainment mode that kicks in to avoid interrupting full-screen programs. Both rely on a number of proactive protection technologies to prevent potentially dangerous activities. Both include an option to prevent transmission of user-defined personal data.

Of course, Outpost Firewall omits antivirus scanning and adds firewall protection. In addition, its Web Control feature lets you block Flash, Java, and other types of active content. You can set it to block online advertisements, and you can lock down specific files and folders to prevent all access.

Protection Against Hack Attack
Outpost properly stealthed all of the test system's ports, making it invisible to outside attackers. It resisted all the port scans and other Web-based attacks I threw at it; in several cases it specifically identified the attack and blocked all access by the attacking site for five minutes. That's better than Windows Firewall, which can manage stealthing the ports but doesn't take specific action against port scans.

The firewall component in top suites like Norton Internet Security (2013), Kaspersky Internet Security (2013), and Bitdefender Internet Security 2013 will block attacks that attempt to exploit vulnerabilities in Windows, the browser, or other sensitive applications. When I attacked these firewalls using thirty-odd exploits generated by the Core IMPACT penetration tool, they detected and blocked nearly all of them.

Standalone firewalls don't do as well in this test. Like Comodo Firewall 5 and ZoneAlarm Free Firewall 2012, Outpost Firewall didn't detect any of the exploits. None of the attacks managed to breach security, because the test system is fully patched. However, a zero-day exploit would have slipped right past the firewall.

Your firewall can't protect your PC if it doesn't protect itself from attack by malware. A malicious program might try to terminate Outpost's processes or disable its essential features; it wouldn't succeed. I couldn't terminate the single Outpost process visible in Task Manager, and when I tried to stop or disable its services it required user confirmation, something malware couldn't give. That's a good start.

Outpost's self-protection feature prevents modification of its files, so I couldn't disable features by setting them to FALSE in the program's configuration files. I did manage to tweak those files by rebooting into Safe Mode, but that's not something a malicious program could do.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ziffdavis/pcmag/~3/eTaKcHC3UPg/0,2817,2414092,00.asp

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