Using Kill Control in ZoneAlarm Products

Starting with 6.0, the premium ZoneAlarm products contain a new and powerful feature called "Kill control" (or just Kill). Kill can prevent malicious programs from executing on your system. Kill is handled through OS Firewall. The Kill control will prevent an application from starting or kill an already started process.

This is what Kill looks like in the Program Control section of ZoneAlarm:

The Kill setting can be set either:

• By the user
• By SmartDefense Advisor

This is what an application set to Kill looks like on Program Control:

As you probably already know, ZoneAlarm provides automatic configuration of many well-known applications. This is done through SmartDefense Advisor. Using SmartDefense Advisor, Zone Labs security personnel can set malware currently spreading on the Internet to Kill, thereby preventing infection of a ZoneAlarm Pro/Suite user. Setting a program to Kill is only done when the program serves no other purpose that harming your security (think Worm, Trojan, Keylogger).

This can be done much faster than signature updates and other common industry protections and allows us to protect our customers much faster.

So, if you have SmartDefense Advisor set to Auto, and you get hit with malware we know, we will likely kill it from your system — preventing infection or damage.