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Personal Firewalls Keep Intruders at Bay

We tested McAfee, Norton, and ZoneAlarm's firewalls and picked a favorite.

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Inside Norton Personal Firewall 2000

What was once WRQ's popular AtGuard now lives on as Zone Labs's $49.95 Norton Personal Firewall 2000, which also contains a privacy control feature that claims to prevent sensitive data, such as credit card numbers, from being sent to an insecure site. Personal Firewall 2000 is also available as part of the $69.95 Norton Internet Security 2000 package, which includes Norton AntiVirus, an ad blocker, and parental controls. Personal Firewall 2000 works on most Windows operating systems, including Windows 9x, NT, and 2000. Personal Firewall 2000 includes a year of free updates and new firewall rules that smoothly integrate into the program. (After the first year, continuing the service costs $6.95 a year.)

Norton's firewall proved much simpler to configure than McAfee's. When you install Norton, the Rule Assistant Wizard pops up to help with configuration. You can either use the Auto Configure Wizard to help you set rules, or configure the security settings yourself. If you choose the latter option, you can select one of three security settings (Minimal, Medium, or High) from the Internet Access Manager. Selecting Minimal will have the firewall block only known malicious applications; Medium will block most malicious applications; and High will allow only programs you designate to access the Internet. The High setting will also require a prompt when you run Java and ActiveX applications. You can also customize any of the settings, and shut off Java or ActiveX applets.

With Norton's Personal Firewall 2000 in place, we returned to Shields Up. At the firewall's default security setting (and even at the highest setting), the site was able to read some of the names (such as our PC's user name) as well as the Media Access Control address of our network card, a unique number that identifies you when you're browsing. When we had the site probe our PC's ports, both the identification port and the NetBIOS port (used for print and file sharing) were visible, but closed to access.

Bottom line: Although Personal Firewall 2000 is easy to use on a wide variety of operating systems, for the price we'd like to see stronger security.

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