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You've just installed superfast broadband Internet access, and now you can leap around the Web at warp speed, unencumbered by a snail-like 56-kilobits-per-second dial-up connection. While dial-up's slowness may be maddening, dial-up can be safer than an always-on broadband connection, which can be penetrated more easily by hackers, crackers, and other unscrupulous types who want to access your files.

Must you live with dial-up speeds if you want to be safe? Not if you use a personal firewall. To see how well such software products hold up against the evil that lurks out there, we tested three personal firewalls--Network Associates' McAfee Firewall, Norton Personal Firewall 2000, and ZoneAlarm 2.1--on an Athlon-750 system running Windows 98 with a cable modem Internet connection.

One purpose of a firewall is to check out packets, chunks of data that travel to and from your PC when you visit Web sites. A firewall also acts as a filter between your PC and the Web, and between your PC and any application you use to access the Internet. When you install a personal firewall, you'll usually encounter a wizard that helps you set rules about what data can pass through the wall and which applications are allowed to connect to the Internet. For example, you might want to allow ICQ to send and receive messages, but you might want to block Java applets. To test McAfee, Norton, and ZoneAlarm's effectiveness, we installed each product one at a time, and then took our firewall-protected PC to a Web site that simulates a hack attack.

Behind McAfee's Firewall

The first product we tested was the retail version of Network Associates' McAfee Firewall. McAfee purchased Signal9's ConSeal Private Desktop--a thorough, but often difficult-to-configure firewall--and now sells it through retail distribution for $29.95. Don't confuse this product with Personal Firewall from McAfee.com. (You can buy either product online at McAfee.com. To avoid confusion, Shields Up directly leads to the product we reviewed. Network Associates doesn't sell the product directly.) Network Associates also integrates McAfee Firewall into its Internet Guard Dog Pro, a $49.95 suite with antivirus protection, an ad-blocker, and parental control software.

McAfee's product is easy to install, but its interface isn't as friendly as those of the other two firewalls we tested. You can either configure it by answering the basic setup questions, allowing it to filter incoming and outgoing traffic on its own, or you can set it up manually. The manual setup requires that you dig into the options of the program, and that you have some networking knowledge. In manual setup, you can choose from three settings: Block Everything, Filter Traffic, and Allow Everything.

If you need guidance during the setup, however, you won't find it in the included documentation. Though the manual sports an excellent glossary of networking terms, it doesn't offer much help in deciphering what the various settings mean.

To test each product, we first visited Gibson Research Corporation's Symantec' site to find out just how vulnerable our test PC was to a hack attack. Shields Up can also determine which ports--the various connections on a PC that hackers can attempt to penetrate--are open. When we went to the site without the benefit of any security software, the site's test was able to find out the name of the PC's registered owner, the PC's IP address, which ports were open, and a host of other information.

Next we installed each product in its default setting, and then tried the Shields Up test again. With McAfee's firewall in place, in its default setting (Filter Traffic), none of our user information was visible. When we asked Shields Up to probe our system's ports--a common tactic malicious hackers use to gain entry into a PC--only one (the identification port) was visible, although it stayed closed. The site gave us a "very secure" rating, meaning that the firewall effectively blocked unauthorized external contact with our computer. That meant hackers would be unlikely to succeed in infiltrating our system, but they could verify that it was online.

Bottom line: McAfee Firewall offers solid protection in a somewhat rough interface.