July 10, 2008

Windows update leads to web black-out - Hundreds of thousands of people who use the ZoneAlarm firewall to protect their PC have been locked out of the internet by Microsoft's latest round of software updates.
posted by Hank Mabuse 16 years ago
  • MonkeyFilter saves the day for the rest of my family, who use a ZoneAlarm protected computer. Cheers, Hank.
  • It had me for a bit after the update reboot.. til I switched off ZA. I discovered that it will work if you turn down Internet Zone Security to medium, which kind of negates the point of using ZA. A head scratcher. Uninstalling the update appears to solve the problem.
  • People who run Zone Alarm get what they deserve. The solution is switching it off. Personal Firewalls are Mostly Snake Oil
  • I believe this is related to that major DNS weakness that we're all going to learn about very shortly.
  • The samspade link above is pretty much short on any kind of reasoning and large on opinion, from what I see. Reads like something from maddox. Not helpful and also bullshit.
  • I can say from experience that not having firewall software installed is far worse than having it. Also, we used to report people who made repeated attempts to crack through at my old job (running BlackIce, nothing more), and after about six months of that got a personal email from a manager in SBC's abuse department thanking us for all the work we were doing and encouraging us to keep it up. Of course, we weren't reporting every script kiddie who bounced and disappeared never to be seen again, which may be the source of the contempt mentioned in that snake oil essay.
  • I don't understand. I have ZoneAlarm, and am currently updating my system with the update and don't see wha
  • well no thanks! mr medusa and I experienced this problem yesterday, but without the aid of my monkeypatriots, we had no idea what the problem was (other than the safe metric of "blame zonealarm")
  • I like and use the Comodo software firewall (also free), but more out of concern over outbound traffic than inbound.
  • That's basically what I use ZA for, to watch outbound traffic.
  • ZoneLabs have just gone live with the fix for this, so switch on yer updates.