Zone Alarm Security Suite 7
Oct 15th, 2007 by Vinny
A couple weeks ago I installed the Zone Alarm Security Suite from zonealarm.com. It has been working quite well after a few days of tweaking and a beta version. The version published on their website when I downloaded it had a bug in the virus scan engine. The bug basically took over your computers CPU while it constantly scanned for viruses. It ate memory like no other. They released a beta version, 7.0.408 which fixed all the issues I was having.
The security suite has a lot of built in apps, so its really an all-in-one solution. There is a firewall module, program control module, anti-virus, anti-spyware, e-mail scanners, IM scanners, and parental controls built in. I disabled the e-mail, IM, and parental controls because I am mostly concerned with firewalling and application control.
Zone Alarm has an automatic mode that you can run for a few days to let Zone Alarm figure out what the norm is for your computer. This is nice for the users who don’t really want to tweak every little aspect of the security suite. For other users like myself, you can turn off the automatic learning, and make it prompt you for every little detail. I have to warn you, this can get very tedious! Most applications call other applications, and Zone Alarm treats those as a new program to restrict. You can disable this feature per program by not authenticating components in the program tab by right clicking on the application that calls them.
The firewall/program feature is nice for keeping you aware of what your programs are doing. It is amazing how many phone home automatically without you even knowing it. You can now block those requests if you want. Per application you can restrict local and internet serving, and access to the local network or internet.
The virus scanning engine updates every day and seems to work well, I haven’t had a virus in a long time but it has caught some bad internet cache.
Overall I would recommend it as a great security suite that covers all the bases; it works for power users and normal users alike.