The major concern
nowadays is related to pieces of software installed in
your computer which may contact and exchange information
with the outside World without being authorizated and
noticed by you.
Odds are that your
machine is open wide. Some piece of software you have
installed in your computer may be sending private and
confidencial data to some place in the World without
your knowledge.
AWFT
probes the protection provided by your Personal
Firewall software using six different tests. Each test
uses a different technique for gaining access to the
outside World.
Techniques are differently rated, according to their
sophistication, and your Personal Firewall is doing a
great job if is able to score 10 points in total.
If your
Personal Fireall scored less than 10 points you may be
able to adjust some settings to improve its
performance. Do it and repeat the AWFT tests until you
are happy. If you remain unhappy with your Personal
Firewall you may, of course, try a different one.
Remember, if AWFT
can contact the outside World without being stopped,
some trojan horse would be able to do that as well.
While AWFT is here for good, the trojan horses mission
is steal and destroy.
We will not endorse any particular brand of PFW. Some of
them can be configured to succeed in more than 50% of the
tests but this has a cost in terms of usability, you have
to judge by yourself and decide how much you are ready to
sacrifice in exchange for more security.
Of course, a few PFW brands will not improve at all no
matter how you configure them.
From our experience, if you go with the Kaspersky Internet
Security you will not make a bad choice. Their antivirus
component is a killer, now also with rootkit scanning. The
product comprises an effective network traffic monitor
that passes all traffic through the antivirus engines and
a bunch of other capabilities. Unlike other brands, the
support is responsive. |
