Not too long ago, I was not familiar with firewall software and I was not too concerned about it. My computer had been hacked many years ago and every now and then, but I never persued a solution to these pestering hackers with nothing better to do.

This all changed when a friend referred me to ZoneAlarm for a fix to my hacking problems.

I was amazed to find that it was a free program and it was only a small download from the Internet. I thought good firewall protection only came from bulky utility packages and took up large amount of your hard drive.

ZoneAlarm is totally different. It's small to download, a small installation on your hard drive and takes up only a small portion of memory.

Because ZoneAlarm is a small program, doesn't mean it's not powerful. It's got quite a kick when it comes to hackers. If a hacker manages to find your IP address on the Web, (this is made difficult as ZoneAlarm makes your computer invisible) their computer will lockup 9 times out of 10, and they will have to restart their machine.

A very useful feature of ZoneAlarm is that it actually tells you the IP of the person trying to access your computer in real time and will block them out according to your Network and Internet security settings.

Myself and a group of friends at University tested ZoneAlarm extensively in Network security and it exceeded our expectations by far. IP sniffing, bombing and spamming all failed and shutdown the sender within 5 seconds.

Recommended: Yes