FortKnox Personal Firewall and Spy Emergency 2009

Firewalls and Anti-malware programs in particular all seem to be heading in one direction - suites!  In this highly competitive and lucrative market they are also trying to out-do each other by stacking in new features and constantly updating the old ones.  Whilst I am not criticising the development it is still a fact that some of these new features are of dubious benefit and along with them comes an increased risk of instability.

 So, what (if anything) extra are you likely to get by considering a commercial program over a freeware alternative?  Well, in many cases not a lot!  The one thing that might be better is the degree of service support and I guess for security applications this could well be a reason to pay.  

The programs I am going to introduce both come from the same source, a company called Netgate Technologies who are located in the EU (Slovak Republic).  Netgate have been developing software security solutions since 2003.  The firewall is called FortKnox Personal Firewall and although you might recognise some similarities between this and Sygate, some of the feature ideas were taken from Sygate, but the build is completely independent.  Why I like this particular offering first off is because it's so easy to set up, the majority of users not even needing to look at the advanced sections.  The GUI is modern, clearly set out and functional with great icons and a font size which means you can read it!  For those of you blinded by the Matousec tests, although this program does contain application control it is not a full-out HIPS so the results for leak testing will never be outstanding.  It's primary function is to be a firewall and it does this very well.  If passing leak tests is important,  you can always add your own standalone HIPS to cover this function.  What FortKnox does do though is to provide amongst other things automatic rules for:

Shared files & printers
Statefull Packet Inspection
Neighborhood network browsing
Anti-MAC & DNS spoofing
Universal Plug 'n Play
Intrusion prevention
NetBIOS
DHCP
DNS
Port scans.... and others!

There's even browser support for IE, Firefox and Opera for Ad blocking, ActiveX control, referrer blocking and cookies.   All of this comes with a choice of skins, and the layout and content for the popups and log entries is excellent. 

FortKnox's big brother is called Spy Emergency 2009 and is a complete anti-malware solution with  a host of features including a web guard, memory guard and spam protection.  It protects across the whole spectrum of malware but will coexist with some other applications if users insist on running two together.  There is a known issue with Avast! but Avira has been tested in tandem to be trouble free.  Unlike many similar programs you will not see any noticeable slowdown in system operations but your memory use will take a hit so this might not be suitable for older machines.

Netgate also produce a suite combining these elements into one package (Internet Security) but I have no operational knowledge of this version.

Anyone doing some history research will find that a cautionary mark was placed against this company during its early stages of development.  Martin Pekar of Netgate freely acknowledges that some of their marketing methods were ill thought out at the time but wishes now to be judged by the present and not past events.

Both of these applications are innovative and different enough to make them worth a look.  For ease of use especially in my experience they are outstanding.   There are of course many great freeware alternatives already featured here on the site but those needing professional level suppport may want to consider these commercial alternatives.