A Firewall for your Personal Needs

Since Web browsing has become one of the most common tasks in our daily life,

it has also brought with it many security issues. So if you think you can surf

the Net in peace, you are mistaken. There will always be somebody trying to hack

into your PC. What you need, therefore, is a personal firewall. This time we got

our hands upon Sunbelt Kerio Personal Firewall that has a built-in intrusion

prevention system that identifies and automatically blocks both known and

unknown attacks. For this firewall you need a minimum of 64 MB RAM, 10 MB free

space for installation in your HDD and minimum screen resolution of 800x600

pixels. It supports Win 2000 Pro (desktop version), Win XP Home/Pro/Media

Center. Note that it does not run on any 64-bit versions of Windows, including

the latest Windows Vista.

Installation



There are two versions of the software available on the Kerio Personal Firewall
official website-free (which has limited functionality) and another priced one.

Download the set-up file and double click on it. The installation process is

pretty straightforward. The machine will restart after the



installation is complete. You can launch the firewall configuration window from
Start>Sunbelt Software>Personal Firewall>Firewall Configuration. Note that once

you have restarted your machine, the Firewall will automatically start up with

its default configuration.

Configuring network security module



You can configure network security, by opening the firewall configuration

interface. Then go to Network Security>Applications. By default, the Enable

Network Security Module is enabled. If not, enable that. Here it shows a list of

applications and Trusted and Internet In/Out, which shows how the application

behaves during the connection. For editing the connection setting, select the

application by clicking only once on the application name. Then click on Edit

button or you can just double click on it. Then select any one of the actions

for the application: Permit-allow the connection, Deny-block the connection and

Ask-ask the user to permit or deny the connection.

It lets you control the apps individually. You can choose ask, permit and deny for each app that uses network or the Internet

Changing the predefined rules



There are some predefined rules that are set by the Kerio Personal Firewall. For
changing these predefined rules, go to Network Security>Predefined tab. Note

that you can't add or remove a predefined rule. By default, the Enable

Predefined Network Security is enabled, so for configuring the rules click on

Permit/Deny action for the rules and here you go. For loading the default

setting again, click on 'Set to Defaults' button.