Norton Personal Firewall 2002
by Symantec

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• Brand new item sold in a white paper sleeve.

Software Reviews of Norton Personal Firewall 2002

Customer Review: A detailed personal firewall
Summary: 5 Stars

Norton Personal Firewall is one of the three main packages out there offering this capability, along with Fail-Safe Technologies ZoneAlarm Pro 2, and McAfee's own McAfee Firewall software. These products work by monitoring all TCP/IP and IP Port activity on your system, and by acting (hopefully intelligently) on such activity when it occurs to keep the bad guys out of your system.

I run this under Windows XP, and so far it's worked quite smoothly. The program is more complex and is more difficult to configure if you want to customize the settings than ZoneAlarm Pro 2, but that's to be expected given all the extra options. Since I use this for a home PC, I may not need all the extra filtering and customizing capabilties that this offers, but it's okay. You have it if you want it.

I switched over to this program when I had some conflicts with ZoneAlarm Pro 2, although I like the simpler, more intuitive interface of it better than Norton. The conflicts may have been with Netsonic's Netboost caching program, rather than with Norton Anti-Virus, and I still need to do a better job of troubleshooting to nail that down. If I can resolve the conflicts, I might switch back to ZoneAlarm Pro 2, for one reason.

I can't seem to figure out how to configure Norton so that it pops up an alert whenever a program trys to access the net, so that at that point you can decide whether or not you want to permit it. You can set up logging so that it monitors everything, and you can even set up customized rules that are fairly detailed, but not this. I figure there has to be a way, but what with the extra complexity of the program I just haven't seen it yet, but I've looked at all the screens.

One thing Norton does implement better than ZoneAlarm Pro 2 is what it calls "Intrusion Detection." This pops up an alert when port-scanning is detected. ZoneAlarm Pro 2 does this simply by alerting you to every inbound attempt to communicate with your system, so it's really no different, but if it works right, you'll be informed of actual port scans whereas ZoneAlarm Pro 2 may not tell you that's what happening, it'll just say there was an unauthorized attempt to communicate with your system.

Obviously, there is a trade-off here between a program's ease of use and how much the developer wants to communicate to the user (who may not be that technically literate) all the details of what the firewall is seeing that's going on "under the hood." Since I was a professional NT system administrator for many years, I'd like to know about it just for general curiosity's sake, although it's probably not that important for most people.

I can't comment on Norton's product versus McAfee's, since I haven't used it myself, but I'd be interested in knowing how it compares with the McAfee offering.

Anyway, so far Norton's Personal Firewall has worked quite well and I'm very satisfied with it. I'll be extremely satisfied with it if I can just figure out how to do that one thing I mentioned.

Description of Norton Personal Firewall 2002

Getting started is fairly simple and very straightforward. Wizards scan the system for Net-enabled programs and watch for unusual requests for access from within and outside your computer or network. After the first day or two, most users will forget that the software is running: notifications come fast and furious at first and then taper off to one or two per day at most (depending on what the user is doing on the Net). The most noticeable change in the system is a very slight delay in loading Web pages, and this only for bulky sites.

As with any computer security product, Norton Personal Firewall has an upper limit of protection it can offer, at which point the user's knowledge and expertise are required to go further. For most home users--unlikely but still possible targets for assault--Norton Personal Firewall 2002 goes far enough and should keep data safe from all but the savviest hackers. --Rob Lightner

But Norton Personal Firewall doesn't stop with intrusion protection. It also prevents personal information from being retrieved without your knowledge, including through spyware and Trojan horse programs, by controlling the applications on your PC that can be accessed through the Internet. It automatically sets up firewall rules for the most popular online programs, so you get protection without a hassle. And, greatly simplifying firewall protection for your home network, it automates the process of locating all your computers so you can easily assign them to a trusted security zone.

Whether you have a dialup, DSL, or cable connection, your PC needs the vital protection of Norton Personal Firewall 2002, your defense against hackers and privacy threats.

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