Sygate beefs up personal Firewall Pro

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By Sam Costello

(IDG) -- Sygate Technologies announced the release of its latest Personal Firewall Pro Thursday, which adds intrusion detection and protection from recently discovered personal-firewall vulnerabilities to the product.

Personal Firewall Pro 5.0 is a $40 product the company is targeting at home and small- and home-office users. It performs standard firewalls tasks such as blocking unwanted connections to a computer and detecting possible attacks, but also adds new security features to protect operating systems, networks, and applications, according to Babak Salimi, product manager at Sygate.

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DoS and Spoofing Protection

The new version of the firewall protects users from denial of service clients and Trojans, which let attackers gain access to or take control of a PC on which those applications were installed, Salimi says.

The software also adds a feature to block spoofing (a technique used in computer attacks by which the attacking computer is made to appear to have an IP address other than its own). It also blocks attacks using such recent vulnerabilities as the flaw in Windows XP's Universal Plug and Play service he says (see "Feds to XP users: turn off plug and play!, link below).

Blocking Outbound Connections

Also fixed in the new version is a flaw found in a number of personal firewalls that allows programs that use program code other than the one supplied by Microsoft in Windows to generate outbound connections, he says.

Firewalls generally block outbound connection attempts, which are often the hallmark of a Trojan or denial of service attack. Tom Liston, a network administrator with Prem Magnetics, first discovered this vulnerability in a number of personal firewalls, including previous versions of this product, in early December.

The engine that Sygate Personal Firewall Pro is built around will also be used in the company's forthcoming Sygate Secure Enterprise 3.0, which is the company's enterprise-targeted product, Salimi says.