By the ZoneAlarm team
A year and a half ago, one of the largest online bill paying sites in the
If you were a customer at that time, you may have been redirected to a malicious Web site that tried to install a Trojan onto your computer. The Trojan was designed to spy on you and steal usernames, passwords and anything you typed.
But wait, if you were using the ZoneAlarm Pro Firewall (or Extreme, Suite or our Antivirus) on your PC, you would have been protected because it has a special ingredient that detects such foul-play and alerts you.
That secret ingredient is the OS Firewall. What’s an OS Firewall? It’s like having a Secret Service team working for your PC. It does something above and beyond inbound-outbound firewalls.
Pretend for moment that your PC is a very high-end jewelry store. Having an outbound firewall (all ZoneAlarm firewalls have one) is like having guards at the door who monitor everyone who tries to take things out. If someone is walking out without a proper receipt, they are arrested.
So why do you want an OS Firewall too? Because it’s like having a Secret Service team inside the store that stops suspicious or damaging behavior – behavior like sneaking jewelry into a purse or pulling out a weapon.
In your PC, this means that it’s the OS Firewall that can stop hackers from doing things like:
· installing rootkits, which give them undetected access to your computer
· code injection that takes control of a trusted program in order to make it steal, spy, or download malware
With an OS Firewall, if new malware—as yet undetected by antivirus programs—gets onto your system, it simply can’t get away with most bad behaviors.
If you are curious, the technical details are that the OS Firewall hangs out at the operating system level and monitors behavior like installation, registry and file changes, keyboard and mouse code control, and over 40 other potentially dangerous actions. Regular inbound-outbound firewalls can’t do any of this.
Your identity, passwords, and other confidential information are at least as valuable as precious jewelry. Don’t let them be stolen.