BlackICE a good firewall? Yes and no
Written: Jan 05 '02
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Good intrusion detection
Cons: No outbound blocking, does not stealth all ports
The Bottom Line: BlackICE should only be used as extra protection with a firewall that has outbound blocking. Newer personal firewalls with intrusion detection systems may make BlackICE useless.
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| frankdrebin's Full Review: Macmillan BlackICE Defender Full Version for PC (1... |
I bought BlackICE and I liked it at first. It didn't slow down my cable modem connection even on the highest setting (Paranoid) and picked up numerous intrusion attempts. The support website gave good descriptions of each of the different attacks.
I did not know at the time that outbound protection was as important as inbound. I found a program called Webhancer, commonly known as spyware, running in the background on my PC tracking my browsing. BlackICE did nothing to stop this program from accessing the Internet. A good firewall should do three things: 1) Stealth all ports to hackers, 2) Monitor inbound data for suspicious activity, AND 3) Prevent unauthorized programs and trojan horse viruses from accessing the Internet. BlackICE has the intrusion part down, but during testing it did not always stealth all ports and will only stop trojan horse viruses it recognizes. What about new ones and spyware? If you plan to run a disk defragmenter it will never complete unless you shut down the BlackICE service first because it accesses the registry every few seconds.
I installed Sygate Personal Firewall and it works great. It is easy to use and has powerful features. You can add firewall blocking rules to make your PC more completely stealth, and back trace to see who is probing your system. It has been a few weeks and no intrusions have made it through to the BlackICE log. A file SSDPSRV tried to access the Internet and Sygate prompted me to decide to allow it or not so I blocked it. It turns out this file is a major security flaw of Windows XP and ME. Sygate also passed tests from ShieldsUp, DSL Reports, and Securityspace. I no longer recommend BlackICE as the firewall of choice.
Recommended:
No
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Epinions.com ID:
frankdrebin
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Reviews written: 2
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