The program runs all the time and shows as an icon in the system tray. You click on the icon to view the popup menu of the system. This means that threat information is available on demand. However, on the downside, threat alerts are easy to ignore, which is a risk. Download TinyWall. The maker of Outpost, Agnitum Ltd, was sold to Yandex, the Russian Google, in and at that point shut down its own website.
You might wonder why a seemingly abandoned firewall is on this list. Agnitum licensed its firewall to other security companies, so this is actually the firewall that you get from other big name cybersecurity providers, including Sophos. Although the paid Outpost Firewall Pro is no longer supported, the free firewall is still going strong. Features of this excellent security utility include automatic whitelisting for well-known software, an anti-leak module that blocks suspicious outgoing messages, a file and folder lock, and an ad and popup blocker for web surfers.
Download Outpost Firewall. This package installs on Windows 7, 8, and The firewall can be set up with several profiles so it behaves differently in each given scenario. For example, you can have a home network setting and a public wifi profile. As well as blocking incoming connections, the suite enables you to monitor bandwidth usage, throttling some apps to make more bandwidth available to key applications. The traffic management functions go down to port number, program, and process.
The monitor is always on and it tracks all activity on your computer, looking for suspicious anything suspicious. Like TinyWall, the firewall functions of GlassWire are actually just a management interface to the native Windows Defender. Download GlassWire. Privatefirewall is a product of Privacyware. However, you can download it for free from software distributors, such as CNet, and Softpedia. The program will run on Windows from XP up to 8.
As well as being a firewall, this utility is a host-based intrusion detection system. It examines the log files on your computer to look for worrying events. It will also protect those log files from unauthorized alteration or deletion, which is a track-covering trick that some malware uses.
The regular firewall features of this suite include whitelisting and blacklisting functions, as well as content privacy controls such as text copy shutdown and clipboard monitoring. The interface for the firewall is a popup context menu that you activate by right-clicking on the program icon in the system tray. The tool will also monitor email activity, disable infected or banned websites from loading, and block internet activity from a specified address.
Download Privatefirewall. OpenDNS is a business network security system that also has a free Home edition. This firewall covers all of the internet-active devices in your home, including DVRs and smart TVs, computers, tablets, and smartphones.
Instead, the service changes your router settings to channel all of your internet traffic through the OpenDNS server. Businesses religiously install firewalls to protect their resources from attack see Best Web Application Firewalls , but the general public has become less interested in this form of protection.
A big reason for this complacency is that protection is often built in to devices. At home, wifi routers offer protection against attack from the internet in the form of a hardware firewall. Many consumer routers have this ability that acts as the first or last layer of defense for your network. The main difference between software firewalls and hardware firewalls is the latter usually works independently of the device.
It has its own hardware resources and will only be attached to a computer via the network. They have a downside too, like Windows Firewall, a hardware firewall usually only monitors inbound traffic unless you configure it otherwise. Both types of firewall work by filtering web traffic. They use three methods of doing this: packet filtering stateless , stateful, and application layer filtering. A packet filtering firewall will inspect all traffic flowing through it and will allow or deny that traffic depending on what the packet header contains.
Packet filtering firewalls are called stateless firewalls because they do not know what is sending the traffic. Some will allow users to set rules to further refine the level of freedom or protection the firewall offers. Stateful firewalls record all connections and watch them as they progress.
That way they know whether a particular program has a legitimate connection to the internet, whether it should be transmitting traffic, what kind of traffic and whether all that matches to the current state of that program.
Stateful firewalls are complicated but very good at what they do. Application layer filtering firewalls adds to the stateful feature by also analyzing the data being transmitted. It matches the program with the application and checks its rules to see whether that connection is allowed or not. It then sends or drops traffic according to those rules.
There are other types of firewall such as circuit-level gateways and multilayered inspection firewalls but these are enterprise-level. Not really relevant to home users. Most free firewall software uses packet filtering. This is a good level of protection for small networks or home users.
It does not allow forensic investigation or content filtering but combined with a hardware firewall within a router, offers plenty enough protection for most uses.
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Usage details how much data each app has used today, this week, or over the whole month, both incoming and outgoing traffic. The Network tab isn't supported in this version of GlassWire but if you were to buy the program, you'd be able to see the devices detected on your network and receive alerts when new ones join. The Alerts section is a hub for all the alerts GlassWire collects, such as when a program was first identified as using the network and what host it connected to.
In GlassWire's menu is an option to go incognito, which will prevent the program from logging all traffic until you turn it back on. There's also a snooze option to disable all notifications for 24 hours. The download link above is for GlassWire v1 because it includes features that were later available only in the paid version of the program. You can get the latest release here ; it's available for Windows 11, 10, 8, and 7.
You can, however, add this portion to the install at a later date if you wish to have a virus scanner alongside this firewall program. The former makes changes based on your behavior, while the latter gives you the ability to control each and every application setting manually.
ZoneAlarm Free Firewall can lock the hosts file to prevent malicious changes, enter into Game Mode to manage notifications automatically for less disturbance, password protect its settings to prevent unauthorized changes, and even email you security status reports.
You can also use this program to easily adjust the security mode of public and private networks with a slider setting. You can slide the setting from no firewall protection to medium or high to adjust whether anyone on the network can connect to you, which allows restricting file and printer sharing for certain networks. Choose a custom install during setup and click Skip all offers to avoid installing anything but ZoneAlarm Free Firewall. PeerBlock is different from most firewall programs because instead of blocking programs, it blocks whole lists of IP addresses under certain category types.
It works by loading a list of IP addresses that the program will use to block your access to—both outgoing and incoming connections. This means any of the listed addresses won't have access to your computer in the same way you won't have access to their network. For example, you can load a list of pre-made locations to block IP addresses that have been labeled as P2P, business ISPs , educational, ads, or spyware.
You can even block entire countries and organizations. You can make your own list of addresses to block or use several free ones from I-BlockList. Several are also available during installation. Lists you add to PeerBlock can be updated regularly and automatically without any intervention. There are three profiles in Privatefirewall, allowing for easy switching between unique settings and firewall rules. The list of applications that are allowed or blocked is very easy to recognize and alter.
You can add new applications to the list and clearly see which are blocked and which are allowed. It's not confusing in the slightest. When you right-click the icon for Privatefirewall in the notification area of the taskbar, you can quickly block or filter traffic without any prompts or extra buttons.
This is a very simple way to quickly stop all network activity at once. You can also use Privatefirewall to restrict outbound email, block specific IP addresses, deny access to a network, and disable access to custom websites. NetDefender is a pretty basic firewall program for Windows. You're able to define a source and destination IP address and port number as well as the protocol to block or allow any address. This means you can block FTP or any other port from being used on the network.
Blocking applications is a bit limited because the program must be currently running to add it to the block list. This works by simply listing all the running programs and having the option to add it to the list of blocked programs. NetDefender also includes a port scanner so you can quickly see which ports are open on your machine to help realize which of them you may want to close.
It works officially only in Windows XP and Windows , but it didn't cause any trouble for us in Windows 7 or Windows 8. It did, however, fail to start in Windows AVS Firewall has a very friendly interface and should be easy enough for anyone to use. It protects your computer from malicious registry changes, pop-up windows, flash banners, and most advertisements. You can even customize the URLs that should be blocked for ads and banners if one isn't already listed.
Allowing and denying specific IP addresses, ports, and programs couldn't be easier. You can add these manually or browse through a list of running processes to choose one from there. AVS Firewall includes what's called Parent Control , which is a section to only allow access to an explicit list of websites.
You can password protect this section of AVS Firewall to prevent unauthorized changes. A history of network connections is available through the Journal section, so you can easily browse through and see what connections have been established in the past. During setup, their registry cleaner software will try to install if you don't deselect it manually.
AVS Firewall appears to no longer be part of AVS's collection of programs that it continually updates, but it's still a great free firewall, especially if you're still running an older version of Windows.
R-Firewall has all the features you'd expect to find in a firewall program but the interface isn't very easy to use.
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