Connecting to the Internet without a firewall is like going to the battle unarmed. It is not possible to save yourself from the online threats without a firewall, there are way too much threats. One of the most frightening ones is the cross-site scripting attack, where you visit a very well known, safe site and a link redirects you to the malicious website in the background, where this website takes advantage of a vulnerability of a program you use daily (such as Flash Player or QuickTime Player) and injects code/places a malware in your system. Thus, it will not be wise to assume that you will be safe by visiting only the safe sites.
Microsoft introduced a native firewall application with Windows XP Service Pack 2. This was welcome at a first glance, but it turned out to be to watch only the incoming traffic. It does not take care of the outbound traffic. What this means is, your computer is not able to “see” if a malware, such as a keylogger or Trojan is sending data out somewhere. So, if you happened to be infected and someone is watching your every move, then you are helpless.
That’s why it is important to have a firewall installed on your system watching the inbound and outbound traffic. Overall security suites have their own firewalls, but if you are using free tools like Avira Anti-virus, Spybot Search & Destroy, you definitely have to add Firewall in addition to your existing malware protection. In this article, we will look into ZoneAlarm Pro, a long-existing and a successful firewall program in detail.
The installation of the program is fairly easy with the Next-Next-Finish steps and with a reboot. During the installation, I suggest you to read each screen carefully and make your choices informingly. For example, the installation will ask you if you want to install the Firewall version only or the Security Suite, you have to go with the former, because otherwise the program will ask you to purchase the product after 15 days.
In the Alert Advisor Settings, there are the Automatic, Manual and Off choices. If you are a do-it-yourself type of person, go with the Manual option. If you want Zone Alarm to take care of everything, go with Automatic. Do not go with the Off option since you will not know what is going on.
When the program completes installation your web browsers will be automatically configured.