Safe But Stingy: Free Firewall, Virus, and Spam Protection It Doesn't Cost a Cent To Keep Your Home PC Secure Eric Grevstad
Mon 1/26/04 -- Let's face it: Connecting your computer to the Internet is like sending your kids out to play in the traffic. With snoops, hackers, virus writers, script kiddies, worms, Trojan horses -- and oh, yeah, spam, spam, spam, spam, junk e-mail, Viagra, and spam -- swarming around every detectable modem, cable, or DSL connection, it's reckless if not brainless to go online nowadays without antivirus, firewall, and spam-fighting software installed.
Fortunately, there are plenty of first-class security suites available for Windows. And realistically, $50 to $80 is a bargain for the peace of mind and data protection a commercial antivirus, firewall, and spam-blocker bundle (such as McAfee's, Trend Micro's, or Symantec's) provides.
But if you balk at even that investment -- say, because you've bought a security suite for your small-business system but still need to protect a couple of home PCs -- you still have no excuse to practice unsafe computing. Several capable antivirus, firewall, and anti-spam programs are free for home or personal use.
Naturally, you shouldn't expect freeware firewalls and filters to include all the advanced features or flexibility of their deluxe siblings -- or lavish tech support, other than FAQ lists, user forums, and in a few cases answers to e-mail inquiries. And you shouldn't abuse the vendors' generous good will by installing their free home versions on 500 machines at your corporate office (or on a home PC that's used for a profitable business, in case you're Stephen King). But if you want protection without paying, it's yours for the download.
Germ Proofing
Last November, WinPlanet brought you the news that Computer Associates, eager to add some small-office and home market share to its enterprise security business, had cut the price of its eTrust EZ Armor antivirus and firewall suite (with one-year update subscription) from $50 to $0 through June 30, 2004.
We've since sampled the 9.3MB download on our home PC, and found it more than satisfactory. One minor surprise was that the eTrust firewall is nothing more or less than a slightly older version of Zone Labs's popular ZoneAlarm Pro with CA logos pasted over the originals. It doesn't have the eBay fraud and host-file lock (spoofed Web site) protection of Zone's latest versions, but includes the pop-up and banner-ad blocking and Web-browser cookie and cache controls not found in the free version of ZoneAlarm, and the same solid performance when it comes to thwarting port sniffers and PC hijackers.
Visually, CA's antivirus program is a plain, industrial-looking affair next to stylish consumer tools like Norton AntiVirus -- its main interface is a Windows Explorer-like window where you can select drives, folders, or files for a manual scan. But EZ Antivirus also lets you schedule system scans and virus-definition updates (the default for the latter is a reassuring daily refresh), and offers a handy wizard that walks you through several separate menus' worth of configuration options.
