When you have access to the Internet, especially over a high-speed broadband connection that’s always on, the connection can go both ways, putting your valuable files and sensitive information at risk. Without special software to guard your PC, hackers can access your computer to steal files or to use it for nefarious purposes— even when you’re not around.
Tiny Personal Firewall (TPF) 2.0 from Tiny Software protects your PC from unauthorized access by monitoring the TCP/IP ports hackers use to get into your system, then allowing you to permit or deny connections, either at that moment or at any future recurrence. Tiny Personal Firewall gives competitor ZoneAlarm a run for its money, since it doesn't host the same annoying ads. If you access the Net from home, especially over high-speed cable or DSL, consider downloading TPF; after all, it's free for personal use. Businesses, go with Norton Internet Security instead for more robust protection.
Comprehensive Protection
To test TPF, we used Port Detective over Juno's ISP service. We tested TPF's high, medium, and low security settings, and found that when TPF was at the highest security setting, Port Detective could not even access TPF. When we reset TPF to its medium setting, the tests ran without compromising any ports. We were able to compromise ports only on the lowest setting.
Fortunately, TPF comes set with the medium level of protection by default, so if you leave it in default mode, you should be perfectly safe. The trade-off: you'll have to interact with TPF annoyingly often to accept or reject communication requests.
Easy Installation
To get started with TPF, just download the svelte 1.5 MB file. (Search for Tiny Personal Firewall at Cnet.com.) The self-executing file automatically starts itself and begins the installation; the whole process takes less than a minute. After TPF's brief installation dialog, in which you enter basic information about your connection and reboot, TPF works in the background from the system tray while you work in other applications.
A Breeze to Use
To raise or lower TPF's security settings, simply right-click the TPF icon in the system tray and select Firewall Administration. By default, TPF is set to "Ask Me First," a setting that tells TPF to ask you for your permission to allow all incoming and outgoing "port probes," or attempts to send or receive data. With this setting, whenever your PC tries to connect to another machine or an outside machine tries to connect to your PC—say, when you're sending data to a Web site or downloading software—you'll have to approve the request.
Another nice TPF feature: the application lets you view the status of all open connections by right-clicking the TPF icon in the system tray and selecting the Firewall Status window. The resulting dialog lists the status of all applications on your system that are sending or receiving data.
Although this information may seem cryptic at first glance, it provides a comprehensive summary of which apps are making contact with the outside world. When an unauthorized application attempts to communicate with your system, an alert window pops up. You can then permit or deny the connection, or choose to add filter rules so that TPF will know whether to permit or deny that connection in the future.
TPF gives you full control over all communication into and out of your computer. It’s easy to operate, if you know what you’re doing (you must know what you’re doing if you're considering installing a firewall).
Tiny Personal Firewall
Tiny Software, Inc.
Version 2.0; freeware
Stephen Bigelow is a member of the Brevard Users Group. This article is reprinted from their newsletter, BUG.
