Sygate Personal Firewall Pro - part I

by Andrew Cooper

Cooper's observations

Hello, PCFlank.com readers. It's Cooper again, reporting from the Internet security battlefields.

I don't know about the arms race--a term one security analyst applied when he was referring to the mounting resistance between the hackers and computer security companies--but the rivalry is getting fiercer and more pronounced every day. Quite often we hear news of a small group of bright cybercriminals beating the whole PC security industry at their own game. Be it a serious flaw in the code of a popular Internet application, such as a Web browser or a search utility, or a tiny mistake overlooked by the creators of a major antivirus or firewall program, when hackers take advantage of it, millions of PCs become compromised momentarily.

This is the problem, and I'm afraid it will continue to remain so for a long time to come. But even with this situation ruling, serious and bold moves should be made to try to reverse this trend.

Introducing the program

In today's review, we will look at how Sygate Personal Firewall Pro, version 5.5, can protect individual PC users from the most modern types of hacker attacks. Also we will try to see what useful and interesting features the program has to offer and learn how these features can be applied to facilitate a pleasant and trouble-free Internet experience.

Without further ado

What comes to your attention when you start the program for the first time is that it's quite simple and light on system resources, with a friendly user interface. The icons and toolbars are quite handy and distinct.



In the main window, the running applications are enumerated.

The authors of the program made a small mistake here, because the program lists as "running" only the programs that have previously been assigned Internet access permissions or those supposedly accessing the Internet. In my opinion, the Sygate people should name such programs "Internet-active" or "connected" rather than "running," because not every running program viewable in Windows Task Manager is displayed. I had MS Word running, and many other small programs, but they were excluded from that list. To be more informative and straightforward, the program requires a small fix.

By right-clicking any program within the list of running applications, users can redefine their access rules and also have an option to terminate any of the programs contained there. This is a big plus! Sometimes we all need to close off some unwanted apps, and this program lets you do it easily.

I also liked the Connection Details view that can be activated from that window. With a right click of a mouse, users can toggle between the Application Details and Connection Details views. When Connection Details is selected, every detail is shown, from the protocol by which the application is accessing the Net to the remote IP addresses accessed and the executable file's local path. Great.



The only setbacks were that I had to go a long way to get to this revealing window and that the Word icon finally showed up in a list of running apps after a short hesitation.

Also, an interesting finding was the traffic monitor of inbound and outbound data, which showed the total speed of Internet connections initiated by the programs. A formidable Block All button lets the user quickly stop all Internet activity, supposedly in case the user suspects some kind of breach and wants to deny all Internet access.

A great Log Viewer module lets program users see every detail of past connections. Various filters and sorting options help speed the search process.

Continue to Part II