[ThePythonicCow]

The software firewalls such as zonealarm that you mention can check for outgoing network connections that your PC tries to make from applications you don't authorize to make connections, but:

• You have to know enough of what you're doing to be able to correctly tell the firewall software what application is allowed to call out and what one isn't. In my experience, the majority of users simply don't have this expertise.
• They don't prevent fraudulent outgoing connections from allowed applications that have been hijacked.
• They do little to stop incoming connection attempts. You need a hardware firewall to do a good job of that.

See the bottom of my Freeper home page, ThePythonicCow's Best Sites for Computers, Networking, and HTML for a list of useful resources.

[DelphiUser]

Hey, I typed that in less than two minutes flat. I was NOT trying to be comprehensive as your page is (Grin) but for newbies it’s a good start.

IF you are a newbie, having a Firewall ask you “Should this be allowed to talk to the internet?” is a scary thing. Once I had ZA set up on my brother’s computer, configured his software and told him, “don’t say yes” he stopped calling me about slowdowns, and Virus’s.

Knowledge is the best preventative, but some good Software is about third down on the list.