According to the 2008 State of the Net summary 1 in 7 computer users had major virus problems.

Having a firewall is a necessity today. Supposedly more than 50% of the PC’s connected to the internet are either not or unsufficiently protected. Because there are so many unprotected PC’s many people become a victim of hackers. A very common scenario: If you do not have a firewall a hacker might abuse your PC to attack other people without you even knowing about it. Many people, even advanced users, tend to use the easiest firewall-solution they can get, but is that the best solution too? This is going to be a review of the FREE Vista firewall Comodo. Help to make the internet a safer place and try to contribute to this or tell other people about it.

Download: First of all download Comodo for free over here. The latest version has been released on December 3, 2008.

The firewall has a size of 27.3MB. After double-clicking the .exe file I was immediately surprised by a fresh and nice installer. It told me I had to deinstall the ZoneAlarm firewall first, which is a good thing because two firewalls running the same time would conflict with each other. I continued anyway, with the intention to deactive ZoneAlarm later. 100MB is needed for the installation on your HDD. The Comodo firewall comes together with an Antivirus (recommended install, see below).

Comodo Features

Comodo is checking for modified processes, services, registry keys and takes notice if there is the slightest change!

In simple words it scans for any vulnerabilites on your PC which might be used to establish outgoing connections. This is a feature that the ZoneAlarm firewall does not have, therefore this is a big big plus right here. Bundled with the firewall comes a toolbar and a suggestion to change your search provider. This is of course their way to make money with the FREE firewall, since they probably get a commission from Ask.com. I unchecked all the options, but feel free to try it out.

After installing the firewall a popup window will ask you if you want to scan your system for malware and viruses. Honestly I did not expect that it would find anything, since my AntiVirus is pretty reliable, but it did! In about 1 hour and 50 minutes it scanned 368.000 files and found 6 malicious objects! 1 of those I wasn’t fully aware of, which is great because that is a proof that this is not just another AntiVirus that pretends to be good so that you can feel save. By the way you can always stop the search and then delete the objects.

After restarting my PC the firewall immediately recognized my local network and was asking for access for certain applications. The user interface is very user-friendly and you can check almost everything from active connections to active processes. Comodo also includes a traffic chart.

What I don’t like so far is that you can’t see the applications (which you added to the trusted zone) immediately. You can find them under “Firewall” – “Advanced Settings” – “Network Security Policy”.

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Also be very careful, this firewall is for advanced users! Some applications may not work if you enabled the Proactive Defense!

Firewall Modes – teach your firewall!

The firewall has different modes to learn more about your computer environment. Go to

a) Firewall -> Advanced -> Firewall Behaviour Settings

b) Defense+ -> Advanced -> Defense+ Settings

Make sure you select “Safe Mode“! This will assure that you can allow/disallow access for every application yourself.

Now every time an application tries to establish a connection it will ask you. Here I am updating the very nice All-in-one IM (instant messenger) solution Trillian:

Actually the firewall is doing a lot more than the average firewall out there, it also tries to make sure that your files will not get modified at all. This is so pro-like!

Comodo’s Firewall also gives “Security Considerations” which are very detailed.

Adding trusted applications

If there is an application that won’t load properly since you installed Comodo, then simply check your log. In my case I would have to click on “651″ or “7″ to find out what went wrong.

Ok, let’s say you want to give access to some applications in advance or Photoshop won’t load properly (that was the case here) then simply open the log or the Windows explorer and write down the path to the file.

Now back to the “Computer Security Policy”

Defense+ -> Advanced -> Computer Security Policy

Click on “Add” -> “Select” -> “From running processes”. Find the process in question and add it, obvious wasn’t it ?

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Once you added the process to the list, right-click it and click on “Edit”. A new window will open, there simply check “Use a predefined policy” and select “Trusted Application” from the dropdown field.

Voilà! Now Photoshop or any other application will load properly.
If you have any question, feel free to ask.