ZoneAlarm has been promoting firewall protection to consumers for ages and ages, since before most people even thought they needed a personal firewall. The current ZoneAlarm Free Firewall 2013 offers the same tough and practical protection as always, with some useful new security bonuses including a Facebook privacy checker and a tool to block advertisers from tracking your browsing habits.

As long as you accept the default settings, installation can be quick and simple. Click once for  a quick install, click again to accept installation of the useful ZoneAlarm toolbar. Those two clicks gets the process started. After a reboot, you're protected. Simple!

The main window features three large panels that reflect security status in three areas: Antivirus, Firewall, and Identity & Data. The first one, Antivirus, is disabled at install. If you're already running a different antivirus, you'll naturally want to leave it disabled. But if you need antivirus protection you can just click to install it. I'll be reviewing ZoneAlarm Free Antivirus & Firewall 2013 separately.

Tough, Practical Firewall

ZoneAlarm pioneered the concept of hardening the firewall against interference by malicious programs. It's no surprise, then, that I couldn't disable its protection using attacks that might be replicated in software by evil coders. It doesn't store status items like "firewall disabled" in the Registry, and I couldn't kill it using Task Manager. When I tried to disable its essential TrueVector service, I got an "access denied" message.

ZoneAlarm correctly stealthed all of my test system's ports, making it invisible to outside attack. It resisted all of my port scan tests and other Web-based tests, though it didn't specifically report attacks the way Outpost Firewall Pro 8 did.

Like Comodo Firewall (2013), ZoneAlarm doesn't attempt to block exploit attacks at the network level. Just to be sure, I turned on all of its alert options and attacked the test system using the Core IMPACT penetration tool. None of the 30 exploits I used actually compromised the full-patched test system, but ZoneAlarm didn't actively block them. Serious exploit protection generally comes with high-end firewalls like what you find in Norton Internet Security (2013)See it at Amazon UK and Kaspersky Internet Security (2013).

Norton and Kaspersky also handle all program control issues internally, without fobbing off security decisions on the user. In ages past, ZoneAlarm was famous for bombarding the user with popups asking whether this or that program should be allowed Internet access. Now it uses the SmartDefense Advisor database to automatically configure access for a vast number of known programs. If you do get a popup query from ZoneAlarm, look at it carefully and verify that the program is something you installed yourself.

When Internet access is allowed only for trusted programs, some malicious programs try to connect by subverting a trusted program. Leak tests demonstrate these sneaky techniques without including a malicious payload. ZoneAlarm detected every single one of the leak test utilities I threw at it. Comodo didn't catch any of these, though its Behavior Blocker offered to isolate them. Outpost flagged all of them, but a handful managed to connect despite its efforts.