Review: Zonelabs Zonealarm Internet Security Suite 6

An excellent all-round security product

Based on Zonelabs’ well-established Zonealarm firewall product, Zonealarm Internet Security Suite 6 incorporates anti-spyware and anti-virus from CA and includes instant messaging encryption.

The fully integrated user interface presents options in a way that’s easy to understand.

The front page contains a link to an animated tutorial and most security options have slider controls to select high, medium or low settings, complemented by fine tuning options tucked away behind ‘advanced’ or ‘custom’ buttons. You can also turn on or off plain text explanations of the controls.

Zonealarm’s firewall is a fully featured product that incorporates various forms of protection, including cookie management, ad blocking and control over mobile code such as vbscript, Javascript and ActiveX controls.

Unlike McAfee and Symantec’s products, there’s no provision for setting up individual profiles for multiple users on a shared PC. For example, the included parental controls allow you to block web pages by category, but you can’t set up different profiles.

The highly configurable firewall is designed to run well with its default settings but there’s plenty of user control over the type and number of alerts that are configured to pop up.

Zonealarm’s new ‘triple defense’ firewall installs the usual network firewall but also adds a ‘program firewall’ to protect running programs from attacks by malware and an ‘OS firewall’ which performs a similar function, protecting the OS itself from malicious modification.

These are additional features not found in the version of Zonealarm supplied with CA Etrust Internet Security Suite.

On detecting a new network, you are prompted whether to add it to the trusted or Internet zones. This enables you to allow functions such as file sharing on your local network while blocking such requests from the Internet or public Wifi networks.

This article is part of a group test of internet security suites. Others are:
Intro and Editor's choice
Symantec Norton Internet Security 2006
Zonelabs Zonealarm Internet Security Suite 6
For other reviews see the PDFs above