Protecting your computer, Part 2: BlackICE makes your PC safe

BlackICE, an Internet firewall, is the hottest new Windows program in months.

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Al Fasoldt's reviews and commentaries, continuously available online since 1983

BlackICE makes your Windows PC safe from intruders on the Net

Nov. 28, 1999

By Al Fasoldt
Copyright ©1999, Al Fasoldt
Copyright ©1999, The Syracuse Newspapers

   What's the best way to keep Internet intruders out of your Windows PC?
   Put up a barrier. Build it high and make it strong. Make a barricade that lets you get out but keeps others from getting in.
   Put up a firewall.
   Anyone who runs a computer network probably knows about firewalls. They protect large networks throughout the world. Homes and small offices didn't need firewalls a year or so ago, but times have changed. The bad guys are getting more clever all the time, and many of us are connected to the Internet around the clock. We all need to take Internet security seriously.
   For many months I ran a powerful firewall program on my remaining Windows PC but felt no enthusiasm for it because it was just plain too intimidating. The program, AtGuard, showed me a zillion charts and graphs and told me all sorts of things about what my Windows computer was doing on the Internet -- and what it was doing on our home network, too.
   AtGuard was porky, too, taking up a lot of resources in Windows. Windows doesn't handle resources well, so any program that hogs these tiny areas of memory can knock out your PC in no time. (Resources are limited no matter how much RAM your computer has, so there's no way out in such situations.)
   AtGuard was overkill. What's worse, it didn't even work right. If you set it up just so -- after a full evening spent reading the documentation and trying out various settings -- you could get it to do things more or less right. But who's got the time to waste with such nonsense these days? Computers are powerful and programmers are smart, so why should we have to do all the work for them?
   The folks at Network ICE, a company that specializes in blocking intruders on networks, must have felt the same way. They developed a network firewall program that's both very powerful and ridiculously easy to use. It's the hottest new Windows program in months.
   This great new firewall is called BlackICE. Within the first five minutes after I installed it, BlackICE detected and blocked an intruder. It even showed me who the intruder was -- in terms of the identity of the attacking computer, not necessarily the name of its user -- and it showed where the intruder was coming from. It blocked another attempted entry a few minutes later.
   The main BlackICE window shows exactly what's going on, too. Unauthorized probes from someone trying to find a way to break in are shown in a yellow graph, and actual break-in attempts are plotted in red. The scrolling rate can be set to 90 minutes, 90 hours or 90 days. This is great for small offices that have computers running around the clock. On Monday mornings or on the Tuesdays after a three-day weekend you can look at the intrusion-detection graph and see if anyone has tried to break in over the previous two or three days.
   I paid $40 for BlackICE at the Network ICE Web site, at http://www.networkice.com. To purchase it, you fill out a credit-card form and then download the software and the manual. (The manual is a 114-page Adobe Acrobat document. It's very well designed.) You don't need to do any configuration when you install the program. Just put move the downloaded file to a temporary folder and double click that file, then click to go along with all the defaults. I like that kind of installation.
   If you want, you can try out various firewall settings after the program is running, but I found the default worked fine. BlackICE has four levels of protection that range from basic -- keeping others from getting at your files through the buggy File and Print Sharing in Windows -- to total, in which nothing can get into your PC from outside no matter what. Start with the default setting and watch the graphs. If you see a lot of attempts, change to a higher level of protection.