ZoneAlarm has been around for years, and is still one of the most popular Windows firewall programs around (about 1.6 million CNET downloads to date).

As reported on gHacks, Checkpoint will be giving away the 2009 Pro version tomorrow - complete with one year of updates. We're not sure about the exact URL for the promotion, but gHacks thinks it will probably be associated with this address.

ZoneAlarm Pro adds anti-spyware protection to ZoneAlarm's firewall product. Pair that with your favorite antivirus program, and you have a full security suite!

The latest version of the ZoneAlarm family has received good reviews. CNET Australia reviewed ZoneAlarm Internet Security Suite 2009 and said, "ZoneAlarm Internet Security 2009 provides top-notch fundamental security protection that is light on system resources, allowing you to work unencumbered." It's also a perennial favorite of PC World, winning Editor's Choice awards four years in a row.

If you're not a fan of ZoneAlarm, you may want to check out Comodo's latest offering.

We'll see if the Checkpoint servers can cope with the increased demand. I'm sure we all remember what happened with the Codeweavers giveaway last month.

Update: at 6am Pacific, this page will be changed to offer the free Pro version.

Update: It's 6am Pacific, and still no link. The traffic has started. As I expected, their servers weren't able to handle the influx and there's a "we're sorry!" message up now.

Update: It's Live! Go and get it!

As a long-time fan of Comodo Firewall, I was glad to see the company developing a more complete Internet defense application. On October 28th, they released Comodo Internet Security.

Why the move? To quote from the press release, Comodo's president Melih Abdulhayoglu believes that "Safe computing on the Internet should be a right, not a privilege." He continues, "We are offering an advanced, intelligent Internet Security package at no charge in order to promote a safer, trusted Internet for everyone."

So far, I'm every bit as impressed with Internet Security as I was with their standalone firewall. Apart from rolling the usual antivirus and firewall features, Comodo's new product sports a number of interesting features and very low resource utilization.

The program's main window is uncluttered and informative, providing a vitals like the status of protection systems and updates, and the present level of network activity. It also features links to quickly lock down your system or set the program to install mode (which tells it ramp down the activity alerts temporarily).

Comodo Firewall Pro, one of the best firewalls available for Windows XP and Vista, has just been updated to version 3.0. Like all previous versions, Comodo Firewall Pro is free, and we like free. Unlike many other free (and some pay) firewall programs, Comodo has a rock solid record for security; we like this even more.

New features in this update include a change to the user interface (it looks more professional now and less GUI 101), an updated host prevention engine and application analysis, and a great new feature called "Clean PC" which profiles all the applications on a new PC (or a freshly formatted PC), registers them as "safe" and then only allows applications you approve to be installed. That's a great way to avoid malware from getting installed on your system - or the system of a less technical savvy relative. The application white list has also been updated to nearly 1 million trusted applications, about a 100x increase over Comodo 2.4.

One warning for users of Windows Vista and Avast! anti-virus, there seems to be a conflict between Avast! and Comodo, leading to long start-up times in Windows Vista. Updating to the newest version of Avast! before installing Comodo can help this problem, but it is still unresolved. Fear not - the program has only been in final release for a day - we're confident the conflict will be resolved quickly, but until then, you might want to wait on Comodo Pro Firewall 3. For everyone else, if you are still using the Windows Firewall (or worse, no firewall at all), we recommend giving Comodo a try.

PCLive Security is a full featured security suite for Windows. It helps protect you from viruses, spyware, rootkits, keyloggers, and adware. Oh yeah, and it happens to be free. While there are several other free security applications out there, none come with quite so many features in one package.

PCLive Security includes the ClamAV antivirus engine, a bi-directional firewall, and a pop-up and adware blocker.

There's also a paid version that includes technical support, hard drive maintenance, and file optimization features for $4.95 per month.

PCLive Security runs on Windows 2000/XP/Vista machines. On the downside, the installation process takes forever, and once PCLive Security is up and running it seems to be a bit of a resource hog. Oh yeah, and it will try to uninstall any other anti-virus software on your PC when you run the installer.

[via WebWare]

While China has a history of blocking computer users' access to many sites on the world wide interwebs, many clever Chinese citizens have figured out that RSS feeds provided a way around the Chinese firewall. Until now.

Ars Technica reports that China has started blocking any URL that starts with "feeds," "rss," and "blog." That makes it pretty difficult to access the feeds for an awful lot of websites, including pretty much any site syndicated by FeedBurner.

It looks like some Chinese users are having success with online feed-readers like Newsgator. We'll see how long it takes before China bans Newsgator. In the meantime, there's always proxies and anonymous web browsers like Tor.

If you want to find out if your website is blocked in China, Website Pulse has a Great FireWall of China testing tool.

[via TechCrunch]

Sure, Windows comes with a basic firewall, but when it comes to protecting your computer from malicious attacks, you can never be too careful. PC Tools Firewall Plus is a powerful firewall from the makers of Spyware Doctor. And it also happens to be free.

PC Tools Firewall Plus gives you much more control over your firewall than the built in Windows Firewall application. There's an expert mode for advanced users, and a normal mode for umm.. normal users. The first time you run the firewall you'll get a bunch of pop-ups asking if you want to allow any programs you're currently running to access the internet.

But once you get past that, you can leave the firewall running in the background and pretty much ignore it. If you want to edit advanced permissions, view your history, or see the packets that have been blocked, you can do that. There's also a new stealth mode that lets your system hide from other computers on the network. In other words, you can connect to other computers, but they cannot connect to you.

[via Cybernet]

So I'm sitting here on a brand new Windows install (more on that later) and thinking, "I have got to get a real firewall up." The trouble is, I'm extraordinarily cheap. For a long time I've been using Sygate Personal Firewall--so long, in fact, that in the time since Symantec has acquired Sygate and killed the poor thing off. It's still available elsewhere on the internets, but is there a better option out there? Tell me, dear readers, who is the king of the free firewall software for Windows these days?

There are tons of threatening viruses, spyware, and other yucky things out there in the world wide web. They have the powers to potentially access your computer if it is not locked down with security software, ensuring there are no kinds of intrusions and any malicious hacking going on. Is your computer protected against the many potentially dangerous things floating around the internet? Do you know for sure? How can you know for sure? And how do you get started and stay on top of your computers security? AOL has made it easier. A whole lot easier at ensuring you know how your computer is doing, staying up to date with its security, and protecting against all things threatening. I recently installed AOL's Active Security Monitor to check out my systems vitals, and how I was doing at staying secure on the machines I connect to the internet with. I knew I was lacking in some areas, but not that much!

Disclosure: Download Squad is owned by AOL. Nonetheless, the following is a completely unbiased review of AOL's Active Security Monitor software by myself. I absolutely loved it, and think it does a very effective job at ensuring users know how secure their computer really is and aiding in increasing security when needed.

We've heard no end to Microsoft's boasting about Windows Vista's first-rate security features, and yet here comes news that by default Vista's built-in firewall, though it has the capability, will not block any outgoing traffic. Wuh? Microsoft says half of the firewall will be disabled because corporate and government customers "would like to manage this feature from an administrator level," and that users who want to block outgoing connections from spyware and viruses will have to turn it on themselves, which "will require a varying degree of technical knowledge, depending on each user's security requirements," and we all know that most users just aren't going to bother.

Symantec is making loud noises about its new "Security 2.0" initiative, which will usher in "a new age of trust on the Internet." What is it? Well, it's some new products with a snappy name. The first product is an unnamed app resulting from Symantec's recent acquisition of WholeSecurity that's designed to prevent phishing. The second is a big new package Symantec is calling "Genesis," and which will go head-to-head with Microsoft's OneCare, providing "anti-virus, anti-spam, anti-spyware, intrusion prevention, firewall, PC optimization and maintenance elements, the transaction security tools, and online/offline backup." Genesis will be a subscription-based product and is being readied for Windows Vista users.

[Via Slashdot]

Microsoft has made much of Windows OneCare, its new security bundle that includes, among other things, a firewall. It turns out, however, that in its default configuration OneCare's firewall is full of holes. According to InfoWorld's Roger Grimes, OneCare automatically permits all traffic from two types of programs: Any program using the Java Virtual Machine, and any program digitally signed. Microsoft has responded to the criticisms by saying that the JVM exception can be turned off (something that novice users will never, ever do), and that spyware is rarely signed. Concerning the latter, Grimes correctly points out that signed spyware is not unheard of and that when OneCare becomes the default security solution for many users, signed spyware will become the norm. While OneCare is still in beta and Microsoft could change the default settings for its final release, their responses (posted on Grimes' blog) don't really inspire optimism.

Oh, the irony. Bob Cringely reported a couple weeks back that PC firewall software ZoneAlarm 6.0 has been caught in the act of sending encrypted data back to four Zone Labs servers, even when communication settings in the program are disabled. Oops. After denying the reports for nearly two months, Zone Labs is now claiming that it's a bug, even though the connection instructions are specifically indicated in the program's XML files.  A fix for ZoneAlarm is expected soon, but in the meantime you can block the traffic by adding a "127.0.0.1 zonelabs.com" entry to your Windows Hosts file.

Makers of firewall and anti-virus software are warning that RSS feeds could be the next big thing for spreading viruses. In this article from The Register, Trend Micro's marketing manager says, "RSS feeds point to HTML pages and as such, they can be made to point to HTML-exploits or malicious JavaScript. It certainly can be a possible way of distributing malicious code over the internet to the subscribers of the RSS feed." Zone Labs, makers of ZoneAlarm, agree.

Personally, I don't buy it. It's not unlikely that such a vulnerability will be found in RSS readers in the near future, but as pointed out in the article, to be a useful medium for spreading a virus an RSS feed has to be very popular. But in order for a virus to get into a popular RSS feed, whomever is publishing the feed would have to insert the virus intentionally, or accidentally create a situation in which a third party could. Though not impossible, it seems like an unlikely confluence of circumstances.

Do you think Trend Micro and Zone Labs will be touting RSS scanning features in their upcoming anti-virus and firewall products?