AppShield best firewall??????
Some experts say AppShield is the best firewall on the market today. The reason for this is most firewalls leave port 80 open where most hackers find their way in to your pc. READ the posted link.
hxxp://xww.zdnet.com/anchordesk/stories/story/0,10738,2871205,00.html
Looking for the full version as I speak.
A word about ZoneAlarmPro from editors at ZDNet,
ZoneAlarm is probably the most widely used free personal firewall today. It offers you almost instant protection from the Internet's most common threats with a user friendly interface and easy to configure security levels. In fact, all you have to do is select one of the 3 preset levels and you are good to go.
While many may think, simply selecting the highest level would be best, this may not always be suitable for your needs, since a high level will also limit some of your internet activity. If this should be the case, you can simply select a lower level and still be properly protected while giving yourself some more freedom when it comes to use certain protocols and ports. However there is no need to know anything about the details, simply use the level that works best with what you usually do on the net.
ZoneAlarm's security levels provide protection from outside intruders and hide your PC from potentially dangerous port scans, the additional application monitor will allow you to set privileges for any application that uses the Internet. Once ZoneAlarm detects that a program is trying to access the Internet, it will pop up a dialog that allows you to grant access or deny it. So after you first install ZA, you will see quiet a few dialogs popping up over the first few days (depending on how many Internet enabled tools you use), but since you can grant the privileges permanently, there is no need to repeat the procedure for each application once you run it the second time. Using this method, you are not only protected from intruders that try to access your computer from the outside (Internet, LAN) but also from trojan activity, caused by malicious applications that open a backdoor to your system or attempt to send data from your machine to a remote location.
Here is a basic example of how ZoneAlarm handles application privileges... You just installed it and decide to sent an email to your friend, as soon as you hit the "send" button on your email program, ZoneAlarm will prompt you that Outlook Express (or whatever program you use) is trying to access the Internet - do you allow it? Yes? No? Remember? Since you trust your easily program, you select "Yes- Remember"... and you will not be prompted again. Next will probably be your browser and so on... Don't be confused by these prompts, it is necessary to provide complete inside and outside protection customized for your system. Once you have used most of your Internet enabled applications, you will hardly ever see a prompt again, and if you do, you may want to take a close look and make sure that you really want the software to use the internet - if you change your mind, you can always revoke or grant privileges from a very user friendly and easy to understand configuration dialog.
If ZoneAlarm detects a connection attempt from an outside source, it will alert you with a dialog, specifying the IP address and port that being attempted to access. Since there is a lot of port scanning activity going on these days, you may get bored by these notifications and can select to turn them off and only log them to a text file. The ZoneAlarm interface also provides you with a "panic button" that let's you terminate all open connections immediately and an optional lock feature. In addition, it displays the icons of all applications that are currently using your Internet connection for quick reference.
For more advanced or network users, ZA offers the option to customize each levels based on IP addresses or host names for a more customized setup and greater flexibility.
Unlike BlackIce Defender, ZoneAlarm does not offer signature based analysis of incoming traffic, which can be useful if you are running a personal web server or similar on your PC since many hack attempts can be prevented using this type of detection.
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