The Best [Windows] Personal Firewall:: 'Leak' Test of 21 Personal Firewalls

mork writes "Matousec.com, as part of a larger analysis of personal firewalls on Windows, has conducted a thorough leak test of 21 pieces of firewall software. Leak tests imitate common methods used by trojans or spyware to send your information from your computer. Windows Firewall XP SP2 fails every test, so the fears that the days of third party firewall software was over seem groundless. Surprisingly the two top programs are both freeware." From the article: "Some firewalls totally failed tests made against their default settings but their results on the highest security settings were much better. Kaspersky Internet Security 6.0.0.303 is the product with the biggest difference between the default settings score and the highest security settings score. Another such product is Safety.Net. Some products like BitDefender, F-Secure, McAfee, Panda, etc. include antivirus engines. The sad and funny thing in once is that lots of them mark leak-testing software as viruses or malware."

Source: Slashdot.org

 

Doesnt surprise me...hehe

 

Wow. Okay, does anyone here who is knowledgeable about this stuff think that these tests and the results they got are legit? Because several of you guys on this forum recommended firewalls like Sygate, Sunbelt (Kerio), Zone Alarm, and someone mentioned Ashampoo, and yet, according to the results in that article, all of them did poorly. Out of those four, Kerio is highest but still in the "poor" range, and Ashampoo is rated as ridiculously low, beyond very poor, almost as bad as the WinXP firewall. I'm just saying I was surprised to learn that these recommendations that have been mentioned on this forum look so bad according to that site. Any opinions?


P.S. I dug up this somewhat old thread (and several others) just because I was looking to d/l a firewall, so I did a search for everything with "firewall". Now I've decided to go with Comodo because of the results on that site.