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=Is your firewall spying on you?

 

Zone Alarm gets rumbled

 

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=29157

By: Paul Hales in Jerusalem Sunday

22 January 2006, 12:39

 

IT’S OBVIOUS, REALLY, that the best way of penetrating users' PCs to see

what they get up to online would be to become a Firewall maker.

 

Like, when I wanted a Firewall and was too tight to pay for one, I

turned to Checkpoint’s little freebie Zone Alarm. It sits there between

you and the Internet and lets you know when someone’s trying to sneak in

through your backdoor or when a program you’re running tries to connect

to the Web for no apparent reason. When you’re as techie as me – not

very – you just have to trust it.

 

Of course, Checkpoint’s an Israeli company and as a foreign journalist

working in Israel you know the hyperactive security services here would

like to keep tabs on you. And you know that they do. It has been

confirmed to me by a security sources here that mobile phone

conversations I have had have been listened to – and in circumstances

which I won’t reveal, the contents of a call I have been involved in

have actually been relayed back to me.

 

It’s part of the game – like the airport interrogation, or the

surreptitious copying of your notepad while you’re off having a body

search. You know what goes on but you have a job to do and just get on

with it – hoping that what you get up to in the legitimate pursuit of

your business won’t upset anyone to the extent that they’ll come break

your door down and cart you off somewhere.

 

Now, the handsomely-named Mr Cringely has revealed that a colleague of

his at Infoworld noticed that Zone Alarm 6.0 was sneakily sending off

data to four different servers. Cringely says that Zone Labs (acquired

by Checkpoint in March of 2004) at first denied the activity for a

couple of months before deciding the software had a " bug " even though,

as he points out, " the instructions to contact the servers were set out

in the program’s XML code. "

 

The company says it will fix the " bug " soon. In the meantime you can

work around it by adding:

 

# Block access to ZoneLabs Server 127.0.0.1 zonelabs.com to your Windows

host file.

 

The " bug " seems to be present in the retail version of Zone Alarm, so

there’s no telling what the freebie gets up to. We called Checkpoint

here in Israel to find out, but were referred to a US spokeszoner.

Trouble is they’ll all be in bed there on this sunny Sunday morning.