NetBarrier has potential, but personal firewalls such as Norton's and ZoneAlarm's protect your PC for less money.

While Intego NetBarrier is a de facto firewall standard in the Macintosh market, its play in the Windows realm is decidedly second-rate. This AU$109.95 personal firewall includes secondary security tools that block some banner ads and some Trojan horses. Surprisingly, even though its simple interface seems to target rookies, NetBarrier doesn't hide your PC from potential hackers by default; you have to change the configuration yourself. However, once set, NetBarrier will protect your PC from malicious users. Perhaps this omission and other small kinks will be resolved in later versions of NetBarrier for Windows, but in the meantime, you'll get much more thorough online protection from Norton Personal Firewall and ZoneAlarm Pro.

Installing Intego NetBarrier is a snap, especially if you're a firewall rookie. Stick the CD in the drive, start the install, and within minutes you're set--well, almost. Some of NetBarrier's basic firewall protection is up and guarding your PC from the get-go. However, for true firewall protection, you'll have to change the default setting to Stealth in order to hide your PC from the Internet. Most other firewalls we've seen automatically stealth your PC upon installation.

As for interface, NetBarrier looks and feels warm and fuzzy, with big icons on the left that take you to the program's four major sections and nicely designed screens and tabs to separate subfeatures. But finding some crucial settings takes digging, in part because of overall sloppy interface organisation.

For example, when we started searching for the place to customise an application's access through the firewall, we were initially stymied. Eventually, we found it buried under the Antivandal section (rather than under Firewall, where we expected it to be); then we had to click a tab, then a button tucked at the bottom of the screen. More intelligently organised firewalls, such as Norton Internet Security's, put customising tools closer to the surface. That might seem like nitpicking, since NetBarrier is clearly designed for the firewall clueless, not the experienced, but anyone who wants or needs to muck around with granular settings will be quickly frustrated.

Like all such PC guardians, NetBarrier's firewall blocks unauthorised access to your computer and controls which applications have the right to send and receive data over the Internet. When you first launch a Web-aware app after installing NetBarrier, a dialog pops up asking if you want to let it access the Internet. In the case of a malicious Trojan horse, of course, you can quickly reject the request with a click of the mouse if you're suspicious or don't recognise the program trying to get online.

When NetBarrier's firewall detects an attack, it pops up a dialog like this one. You can put the originating domain in a no-go list by clicking the Stop List button.

NetBarrier for Windows provides five preset configurations, ranging from No Network, which prevents any app from accessing the Web, to the default Client, Local Server, which lets applications use the Net and allows the PC to act as a server on a local area network (LAN), such as your household network.

Beyond its primary function, NetBarrier offers a kit and caboodle of other security-related tools. For example, the program watches for a limited number of Trojan horses, malicious code that, once on your PC, can gain control of it and use it for all kinds of nefarious activities, including launching attacks on other machines. It also blocks some banner ads (though not irritating pop-up advertising), lets you manage Web site cookies placed on your machine, and blocks user-defined data--such as Social Security numbers or your telephone number--from leaving the machine, something of most value to parents who don't want their children unwittingly unveiling personal info to strangers.

The program also includes a monitoring panel composed of several gauges that graphically show Web, FTP, and e-mail data traffic. But it's more eye candy than useful: who needs (or wants) to watch how many bits blow through their machines?

The one real plus is an automated updater, called NetUpdate, that checks for program fixes or patches once a week and does so without any intervention by you.

But there's a host of security tools not present within NetBarrier for Windows that its competitors currently offer. NetBarrier, for example, doesn't sniff out viruses, detect changed applications (a way some attackers try to get past firewalls, by disguising their code as a trusted app, such as a component of Internet Explorer), nor trace attacks back to their origin as ZoneAlarm Pro does.

We ran NetBarrier for Windows against Steve Gibson's ShieldsUp port tester.

NetBarrier X for Mac	ShieldsUp Port Probe	NetBarrier X for Mac	ShieldsUp Port Probe
Port 21-FTP	Stealth	Port 139-NetBIOS	Stealth
Port 23-Telnet	Stealth	Port 143-IMAP	Stealth
Port 25-SMTP	Stealth	Port 443-HTTPS	Stealth
Port 79-Finger	Stealth	Port 445-MSFT DS	Stealth
Port 80-HTTP	Stealth	Port 5000 UPnP	Stealth
Port 110-POP3	Stealth
Port 113-IDENT	Stealth
Port 135-RPC	Stealth	LeakTest	Passed

We began with IP Agent, a free utility provided by ShieldsUp that determines the test machine's current IP address, then contacts the ShieldsUp Web site to begin testing.

Next, the Port Probe utility tested our system's defense against Internet port scanners. The test originates from the ShieldsUp server and attempts to establish standard TCP/IP (Internet) connections on a handful of commonly exploited Internet service ports on the test computer.

Using ShieldsUp, each port gives one of the three following results:

Stealth: This result means that the probe was not able to find this particular port on your computer. This is the most secure result.

Closed: This shows that the probe was able to detect this particular port on your computer but that the connection was refused.

Open: This result means that the port is actively advertising its presence on the Internet. Port scanners will have no trouble finding it.

The default mode left some ports open or simply closed, not stealthed, but NetBarrier for Windows always warned us of the incoming scan. Only after selecting Stealth Mode in the configuration settings was our PC invisible to the world.

More information on these tests and what the results mean can be found at ShieldsUp.

Intego NetBarrier
Company: Intego
Price: AU$109.95
Distributor: TechTools Australia
Phone: 0500 808 708

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