General Tips & Info FAQ

Personal Firewall Programs

Everyone should practice safe surfing! The two biggest threats to you and your list members' computers are viruses and hackers. Anti-virus software such as Norton, McAfee or AVG can protect you from viruses but unless you're behind a network firewall, you need a personal firewall to protect you from hackers, from the bored 13 year olds with too much time on their hands and easy access to the computer, IRC, zombies and bots.

An excellent and informative website about hackers and firewalls is Steve Gibson's Shields Up! website. Check out his adventures with a 13 year old hacker named "Wicked" who knocked GRC.com off the net on a whim, employing the computers of innocent users all over the world. If you don't have a personal firewall on your computer, it could easily be used to attack other computers, especially if you're on a cable or DSL internet connection, hackers love those superfast connections!

And the good news is that you can get the best personal firewall software for free, Zone Alarm is highly recommended by a number of PC magazines and online websites like ZDNet, C|Net and Steve Gibson's Shields Up website. Just go to the Zone Alarm download page and scroll down past the Pro version (pay) to where it says "Zone Alarm" and there's a yellow button that says "Free Download". Click on that and then, on the next page, click on "Download" under Zone Alarm. You can pay for the Pro version, but the free version is plenty of protection from hackers.

Both Norton and McAfee sell a personal firewalls which comes well recommended. The one personal firewall that I have seen NOT recommended is Black Ice, both Steve Gibson and other PC magazines and online sites have said that Black Ice will let some hacking devices like zombies and bots thru when Zone Alarm will stop them. There's also a couple other programs that are well recommended but from all that I've read, Zone Alarm is the best and easiest to use. You generally don't even need to change any of the default settings, it works straight out of the box.

If you have any problems with it (each computer is different and some individual configurations may have problems with it), then look at one of the others, ZDNet and C|Net are good places to look for recommendations. Plus check out the Resource links on the right side of this page for links to personal firewalls. And if you have problems uninstalling Zone Alarm, the HackFix website has helpful info.