 Is ZoneAlarm Spyware?
Wednesday, 8 February 2006
According to our friends at InfoWorld, ZoneAlarm, one of the most popular (if not over-hyped) personal firewall, anti-spyware and security pieces of software, appears to be spyware. Apparently, ZoneAlarm V6.0 is in the habit of:
“Surreptitiously sending encrypted data back to four different servers, despite disabling all of the suite’s communications options. ZoneLabs denied the flaw for nearly two months, then eventually chalked it up to a bug in the software.”
There’s an interesting debate over at Wilders on just what the ZoneAlarm people may actually be up to, including one theory that they’re in collusion with the American government.
This is not the first time privacy concerns have been raised about ZoneAlarm, either. This hugely popular forum thread, over at Broadband Reports, mentions that ZoneAlarm has secretly been contacting the ZoneLabs servers since at least November, 2004.
ZoneAlarm has always been a “set it and forget it” type of firewall. Designed primarily for newbies, it makes a lot of decisions for you. Lately, it seems, some people don’t like those decisions after all.
Perhaps try Kerio V2.15 as an alternative.
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