There are not many free vista ready personal firewalls besides Zonealarm,
Pctools firewall and
Comodo v3 (beta). Webroot (makers of Spysweeper) now add a fourth with their webroot desktop.
It is a rebrand of
Private firewall . Because private firewall has the HIPS
DSA (dynamic security agent) built in it is pretty strong on leak tests.
Only
Jetico firewall v1 (now abandoned v2 is payware), Online Armor free (to be released soon) and of course
Comodo firewall does better in leak tests.
It's unclear how long this free offer will last.
It is ranked
"very good" against leak tests.
The firewall is pretty standard. You can set different settings for interact with the internet, and for the intranet/network. There are also 3 standard profiles, for home use (including home networks), office (when network is protected by a company gateway firewall) and remote (when connecting to to a company network with no firewall in place or if you are connecting to a local network where you do not know what security is in place).
There are 2 standard levels of security , high/low but you can also customize what rules are turned on, by checking the boxes (see next screenshot).
By default, there are rules for system services, internet explorer, windows explorer, telent client, ftp client, outlook express, LSA, generic host process for win32, service controller app etc. But you can always create your own. But this is accessible only via the '''applications''' section (see next screenshot).
As shown above, you can set each application to allow all, block all, or filter (which imposes the usual rules for the app). Each application can have different network connections rules, which you can change by selecting "customize rules"
The above for example shows the rules that are imposed on internet explorer. The columns "H" and "L" on the extreme right, control whether these rules will be turned on or off when the security setting is set "high" or "low" (see first screenshot).
The above shows the standard options when creating a new network rule for internet explorer.
The above shows a standard prompt warning you of an application trying to connect outwards. Clicking on details/options will give you the next screenshot (you can customize it so it always shows all details as below).
An interesting function that this firewall has is that it attempts to monitor attempts to gain network access through other applications. For example, the next screenshot shows a prompt when this occurs.
Instead of gaining access directly to the net, wallbreaker tries to go through internet explorer and this is reported.
