Hi All Does anybody know of an Endpoint suite that has a decent firewall? by this I mean with cleanly laid out alerts (App, Port/Protocol, DNS look-up) with granular controls (Allow Destination, Allow All etc) and easily manage policies per-application, along with mass-update. I've tried Norton, Kaspersky, BitDefender, Eset, Mcaffee ... From an AV perspective, I've no issues with any of them, but their Firewalls are absolutely awful. Norton was the best I could identify, which says a lot about the state of security on Windows! Given how much spyware and telemetry is baked into every app these days, I'm fed-up with it... I just want control of my PCs back. So by default, I want to alert on everything. But the firewalls in these suites make that difficult, their default is to allow signed and system apps/services access by default, and they either Make it difficult to change this (as it doesn't offer "apply settings to all" apps Have terrible alerting pop-ups which are either unreadable, or only offer "Allow" or "Block", where "Allow" tends to be allow everything (rather than just that specific destination). Thanks
The ESET firewall allows you to put your own rules above the default ones so this way you can have total control of what is allowed or blocked just by the order of fw rules.
Great shout - I've just gone back and re-looked at ESET, actually the Firewall is much better than I first thought, and the alerts are cleanly laid out... So at the moment, this is looking most promising.
I did initially try SimpleWall, but I'm coloured blind and the colour coding just confused my eyes. WFC is OK, and I've been using a similar Firewall called PrivTen which is really awesome, but I'm finding it unstable - But in Truth, whilst Windows Defender and the Windows Firewall are rated good, I'm ****** off with the amount of Telemetry Microsoft is collecting... so my goal is to block all that ****. I'd love to move away from Windows, but I can't for various reasons (I work in IT, so half my homelab is Windows for testing/learning).
why not comodo internet security? you can set the firewall at cruelsisters settings which will offer good protecting with minimal interaction!
Since it's more than one machine you may consider a LAN hardware firewall with pfSense; it's expensive though. https://www.pfsense.org/products/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PfSense
Not really. You can get a refurbished Dell desktop for $100-200, or repurpose an old computer laying around.
ESET has real good and easy firewall controls and granularity. It was recommended here and I am thankful for that. I have not come across anything like that yet.
ZoneAlarm has a decent firewall which is pretty old school-ish and the av is from kaspersky ..... AVG also has a decent firewall with plenty of settings
https://help.eset.com/eis/13/en-US/idh_config_scanner.html?idh_config_epfw_app_content_checking.html “The application modification detection feature displays notifications if modified applications, for which a firewall rule exists, attempt to establish connections. Application modification is a mechanism of temporarily or permanently replacing an original application by another application by a different executable (protects against abusing firewall rules). Please be aware that this feature is not meant to detect modifications to any application in general. The goal is to avoid abusing existing firewall rules, and only applications for which specific firewall rules exist are monitored. Enable detection of application modifications – If selected, the program will monitor applications for changes (updates, infections, other modifications). When a modified application attempts to establish a connection, you will be notified by the Firewall. Allow modification of signed (trusted) applications – Do not notify if the application has the same valid digital signature before and after the modification. List of applications excluded from detection – This window lets you add or remove individual applications for which modifications are allowed without notification.“
