3 Good Reasons Why A Hardware Firewall Isn’t Enough

From time to time I hear pundits and journalists recommending that users uninstall ZoneAlarm and instead depend on the firewall that’s built into their commodity home router for security. I think this is a bad idea. Whether or not you use our product or a competitor’s isn’t what I really take issue with; rather, I think telling people that a hardware firewall is sufficient protection on the Internet will leave people with a false sense of security. Before taking this advice and ditching a software firewall altogether, consider these 3 reasons why a hardware firewall just isn’t enough:

1. A hardware firewall won’t prevent a malicious worm from spreading and damaging other computers on your local network. ZoneAlarm’s program control and OSFirewall features will immediately alert a user when unusual program behavior occurs, containing the threat to a single computer and leaving the rest of the network unharmed.
2. When you’re at a public hotspot in the local coffee shop or airport, your hardware firewall won’t be there to protect you. If you’re a laptop user, ZoneAlarm provides the necessary protection you’ll need when connecting to public networks.
3. ZoneAlarm understands more about the network connections that enter and leave your computer. By using ZoneAlarm to control connections at the point of origination or destination, more informed filtering decisions can be made. Which process is trying to make an outbound connection to 208.185.174.44 on TCP port 8080? ZoneAlarm knows, your hardware firewall doesn’t.