Norton Personal Firewall 2005

Tuesday, March 01, 2005

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Norton Personal Firewall 2005, meant for those who want an advanced firewall to protect their systems. It comes with a few new features. Apart from port and program blocking, it has got intrusion prevention system, Trojan, ad, cookie and popup blocking. The intrusion prevention system uses a list of signatures to protect your computer from attacks. Similarly Trojan blocking also uses a set of predefined rules to block them. These rules and signatures files get updated every time automatic update runs. The simple installation completely hides the PC from the network. To allow certain incoming connections, you can change the default rules to enable those connections. For users who need to connect to multiple networks, the firewall has different profiles (home, office away), with the ability to set different rules for different profiles. The suitable profile automatically gets activated whenever you connect to the network. Privacy control prevents sensitive information, such as credit card numbers, from leaving the system in e-mail, chat, online forms or office attachments. A new feature, as compared to the previous version, lets you define the websites, such as e-commerce websites, to which you can post such sensitive information. Another new feature turns the firewall back on after a set period of time, if you need to turn it off temporarily. The interface is pretty neat, easy to use and configure and most of the options are self-explanatory.

The Bottom Line: Provides more advanced features than the free Win XP and ZoneAlarm firewalls. However, the users of Norton Personal Firewall 2004 may not find the two new features worth an upgrade.

Anoop Mangla

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