Symantec's Firewall?

Not everyone drives the same car, not everyone needs the same firewall.

Black Ice is great for someone who wants to tweak and twiddle, but if you don't know the basics, you can get a lot of annoying traffic, false positives etc.

On the other hand, if you are a Church, i.e. IT is not your business, you have limited time to spend on firewalls, I know the Symantec products are both effective and easy to set up.

James

I just installed a VPN/Router/Firewall for a customer who suffered hacks while using black Ice. Any firewall solution that runs on windows is vulnerable, except Tiny personal firewall www.tinysoftware.com which integrates itself into Windows key bootup files.

I know from experience that some government agencies have used the old Raptor Firewall, recently bought by Symantec, with success.

I started a few months ago on my home computer with the free version, but quickly realized I wanted the PRO version. I bought it for $49 as a download with update protection. The firewall loaded flawlessly and worked, essentially, right-out-of-the-box. The signature files are regularly updated and while not pretty, the program allows for DLL authentication, stealth browsing (works great except in MSN applications, and an intrusion detection system, among other several other features. You can overide the program's defaults and produce "advanced access rules," to include the time of day specific ports or IP address (for instance) can be or will be allowed access to your computer. The program also has a feature to block offending IP addresses for a period of time after a port scan has been detected. Sygate also has a great on-line forum with moderators to assist you with the program, or bugs that you might encounter at . Both Symantec and Sygate security check programs indicate that my computer is fully stealthed (ports) and trojan protected. I highly recommend you try it; it's free for 30 days - you have nothing to lose! If you try it, make sure you immediately upgrade to Build 1120, as there was a bug in the signature upgrade on Build 1117.