Sygate Personal Firewall

What can be the best way of telling a thief that your car is ready to be stolen? Simple! Just leave the car doors unlocked and the keys in its keyhole. Chances are that sooner or later, the thief will inevitably steal the car. Likewise, what can be the best way of asking a hacker to steal your personal documents? Simple! Just log on to the Internet without using a firewall.

What is a Firewall

A firewall is software (and in some cases also hardware) that helps protect your computer from malicious attacks of hackers. In simplest of all terms, it helps prevent applications and some files designed into the operating system from accessing the network. When I say applications, I simply mean all types of applications including web-browsers, chat-engines, FTP software and other operating system specific files. A firewall will help prevent Trojan attacks, spyware, spam, worms, phishing and similar malicious attacks.

Sygate – The Company

Sygate is a company that was previously known as Sybergen and has a long history of quality products. This was the first company to create a domestic firewall that used stealth technology. The Sygate personal firewall is one of the best known and most popular freely available firewall on the Internet. The company was earlier this year bought by Symantec, the leaders in network security systems.

Sygate – The Firewall

A simple setup file of about 8.5MB approximately can be downloaded from https://sygate.com and installed on your computer. The installation procedure itself is very simple although it may require a system restart after the installation is complete.

Simply put, Sygate is one of the best software based firewalls available on the Internet. Lets get into the nitty-gritty of this software. Upon installation, the firewall appears as an icon in the system-tray. Double-click it and you are presented with a screen displaying traffic and attack history graphs. On the left hand side graph, it will show the incoming and outgoing traffic graph while the right hand side graph shows the attack history. At the same time, it will show you a list of the applications and files that are trying to access the network.

The first and foremost thing to do after installing Sygate Personal Firewall is to set permission levels for the softwares to access the network. Whenever an application tries to access the network, Sygate prompts you with a warning message asking you whether you would let the application use the network. You can set the permission levels to Yes, No and Ask Everytime. This is an essential component of setting up the firewall as this helps you keep a tap on the files that can access the network. This is particularly useful in case of virus attack when certain .exe files may get embedded in some hidden folders and may try to access the network. Sygate will prompt you whenever any new file tries to access the network, indicating its name, path and accessibility options. If you know what you are doing, you will successfully be able to stop the file from accessing the network.

Additionally, Sygate keeps a log of traffic and packets that have been transferred between your computer and the network. This is particularly useful in keeping a check on what types of protocols are used to access different services of the network. All services need not necessarily work on the TCP protocol. Hence a log of services using the UDP, ICMP and other protocols may be helpful for a network administrator. Similarly, there is a log available for security levels and for packet filtering. A security log can also do a back-trace to check on a potential security threat.

A Security Test button is available which will take you to the Sygate website. Here your computer will be scanned by an array of diagnostic tests aimed at checking how secure your computer is over the network. Tip of the day for Sygate users: Run this test with and without running the firewall and see the difference!

You can set additional security rules that will override the normal measures that the firewall takes while at work. For instance, if you know the IP Address of a domain, you can simply block it by using these security rules. There are other options available for them too, like you can set permission levels for more than one network adapters and you can change access levels for different web pages under the same domain. An expert hand is often very useful in such scenarios.

I can only compare Sygate firewall to Zone Alarm that I have used for only a few days. The one major change that I immediately noticed after installing Zone Alarm was that the network utilization shot up instantly after installing it. I don’t know how or why because Zone Alarm did not immediately give any indication of any files accessing the network. I presumed that there was some updating going on in the background. The interface of Sygate is, on the in contrast to that of Zone Alarm, more user-friendly, with no attempts being made to make it look attractive. Simply put, Sygate has as simple a user-interface as there can be! Your experience would be very similar to just install it and forget it.

Most users of Windows XP would be familiar with the Windows Firewall too. This firewall has been enhanced greatly in SP2 and incorporates a lot of features of Sygate. It ultimately is the users’ choice whether he wants to use Windows Firewall or third-party software although my personal preference would always be Sygate personal firewall.

System Requirements

CPU: 200MHz or higher

RAM: 32MB

Hard Disk: 12.5MB (approx)

OS: Win 98/ME/2000/XP

Verdict

If you are looking for a killer app, then this is one for you. It will kill all deadly intrusions and protect all your data from being accessible to the network. Download it, install it, restart your PC and forget it. It is as simple as that!

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Since Karana23 has already explained basically all about Sygate, I'm just going to write about my personal experiences with Sygate. Hope I don't bore you, lol.

I used to use Zone Alarm all the time cause it was simple and secure, but one day it started ''acting funny'' so I decided to re-install it to fix the problem (this usually would work) but it refused to install. To this day I'm still not for sure why it doesn't want to install, oh well. After that crap happened, I started my search for a good firewall, after trying about 10 different firewalls and put all of them through ''my tests'' Sygate came out on top for stealth, ease of use and simplicity. Zone Alarm is still better for the average Internet user but right below Zone Alarm was Sygate.

I've been using Sygate Personal Firewall for about 3 months now and it hasn't given me any trouble at all. It has blocked many attacks on my computer and has held strong. It's pretty simple to set up, simple to run and doesn't bog down my computer like some firewalls did. Sygate also doesn't slow down my Internet connection (which I'm on stinking Dial-up so it better not, lol).

Well, that's about all I can think of for Sygate that hasn't already been said. Safe surfing everyone ^_^

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If you are reading this review, it means that its very often that you browse the internet, and it also means that this review can be of great help to you, so read on....

What is a firewall anyway?

In the simplest of words, a Personal firewall is a piece of software designed specifically to protect a single computer. It does this by operating in two basic ways--Firstly, it prevents any applications or portions of the OS from communicating over the internet unless you give explicit permission. Secondly, it protects the computer against incoming attacks. When someone scans a common port range on your computer, they may be looking for a number of things--trojans, open ftp servers and so on. A firewall closes all these holes, so portscans from the outside can't find an opening. Rather than simply telling the hacker that the ports are closed, a good firewall employs stealth techniques, whereby the scanner doesn't get any response at all -- therefore giving no clues whatsoever about the nature of your PC, or even whether it is actually online or not.

Sygate Personal Firewall's Background

This is a product with a long history, dating back to when the company was called Sybergen many years ago. Its claim to fame was that its was the first domestic firewall to use stealth technology. Now, Sygate is providing this excellent firewall free for personal use and there is a professional edition for business users which can be bought on https://sygate.com.

Installation and Validation: 9/10

Installing is extremely easy and there's no irritating user interview procedure (as in Zone Alarm and many others) as this firewall sets itself up effectively in the beginning. Though it doesn't run an initial application scan, it does require the user to validate each individual application when it first connects to the Net. I found this procedure to be much less painful than other firewalls.

Performance: 10/10

In use, Sygate Personal Firewall is as solid as can be, and the program passes all the probes, leak and trojan tests with flying colours (There's a test option which takes you directly to a site which tests for all the trojans) When an inbound attack or scan occurs, Sygate pops an alert from the System tray, logs it and blocks traffic from that IP address for a short time, all automatically. By switching on to the Security Log Screen a backtrace can be performed to locate a particular attacker with a single click and Sygate doesen't just run a WHOIS check on the address either, but a full TRACEROUTE to provide as much diagnostic information to help you report an offender to their ISP if you desire.

Looks and Price: 10/10

The main screen of the Sygate Personal Firewall resembles the Windows Task Manager screen with three real-time graphs showing Inbound traffic, Outbound traffic and Attack History. Every time I see this window,there's this feeling of reassurance that can't be expressed in words. I think Sygate has struck the perfect balance between user friendliness and advanced features, and the pleasing multi-window interface puts all the information at your fingertips in a small amount of screen space. As for the Price, its free. Just download it and install it, that's

it.

Overall: 9.5/10

Sygate Personal Firewall comes across as a wonderfully balanced product. Its small, extremely secure and even more easy to use. I have used Zone Alarm 3.0, McAfee Internet Security 4.0 and Norton Internet Security 2002 and the experience is never that great..they all have wonderful extra features but they simply scare the daylights out of me when something goes wrong and you gotta pay from your pocket for all of them. Sygate firewall has come across as an extremely soothing piece of software. For me, its been install-it-and-forget-it fare...its that capable.

To sum up, I recommend this product with no hesitation, no repitition and no deviation.

Just log on to https://sygate.com and download it folks!!!

System requirements:

Hard drive space : Just 1 MB

Comments and questions are always awaited.....

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