Zone alarm?

[matchless]

as we now have a Router do we still need Zone alarm as I have heard that a Router acts as a Hardware Firewall and your PC is invisible to other PC's, or is it preferable to keep Zone alarm running as well?

[mph999]

Even with a h/ware firewall you should run a decent s/ware firewall also, such as zovealarm pro or kerio. These are able to prevent for example, programs launching other programs without permission, and should stop anything that may have got in, sending anything out that it shouldn't.

Martin

[robdickinson]

A router will use NAT (most probably, Network Address Translation).

In essence the outside world will only see the router, and it keeps a table of requests from internal IP addresses and maps to external connections.

This is great for protecting you from incoming attacks (provided it doesnt explout a router problem, change the default password lol).

What it doesnt do ANYTHING about is outgoing conenctions on your PC or coms between devics inside your router.

So any malicious code downloaded/ran (via i.e. bugs, email , spyware etc) will still be able to make outgoing net connections without your router making a peep - thats where Zone alarm comes in.

[mph999]

Yep, needs to be Zone Alarm Pro though ...

[aldi]

Zone alarm pro = mahoosive pain in the arse with all its umpty-million features that go wrong/stop random things working on a regular basis. Zone alarm free is where it's at, it does outbound traffic controll if you feel you would benefit from that.

[pdV6]

Note that you can get some models of router which will have a built-in firewall.

[slapmatt]

I have a router (Linksys WAG54G) with build in firewall, but still use ZoneAlarm Pro. Do I need both? It's hard to tell, but up til now I've not had any problems with virus/malware/spyware etc. so it's better to be safe than sorry.

The only downside is you have to configure both firewalls for port forwarding if you are using things like Bittorrent etc, however, you only need to do this once and then you're away!

[Tonsko]

You do still need both. Routers can still be compromised - however, if you have a router that is capable of what is called 'Stateful packet inspection', the need for software f/w is less.

for the record, stateful packet inspection looks at the contect of hte TCP/IP packets, not just the headers, as most home use fardware firewalls do. Why is this useful? it builds up a history of packets and as well as filtering on source and destination, it filters on context.