 |
 Personal Firewalls vs. Leak Tests: Part II: "Leak Tests Win Again!"
August 7, 2003
Disclaimer:
All tests were performed with the default “out of the box” settings of the personal firewalls tested. Some firewalls were able to pass some of the leak tests only after they were reconfigured.
Earlier than a year ago, PC Flank tested 13 of the most popular personal firewalls against five of the most frequently used leak tests. The purpose of the tests was to determine which firewall was most effective from a security point of view. Since then many new firewalls appeared and some new leak tests were constructed. The PC Flank team decided to once again determine if the new leak tests really point out the weak points of firewalls.
We decided to test all of the firewalls we heard of, so it resulted in a huge series of tests: 24 personal firewalls were pitted against 8 leak tests. All firewalls were tested with their default configuration right after install. We realize that some firewalls can pass some tests after being reconfigured, but we believe that, since most rookie users do not change default settings, “out of box” tests are more telling.
The leak tests we used are: TooLeaky, Thermite, LeakTest, CopyCat, FireHole, pcAudit, Atelier Web Firewall Tester, TooLeaky, and YALTA.
Most of these leak tests act as a Trojan trying to send out information from the user’s PC to a remote computer bypassing all firewall filters.
Read next:
Leak tests descriptions
Results of the tests
|
|
