• Price: Free to try (15-day trial); $39.95 to buy (Buy it now)
• Operating system: Windows 2003, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008, Windows 2000, Windows XP
• Date added: July 15, 2009

This firewall offers the rare combination of a powerful feature set and an easy-to-use design. During installation, the program finds all popular network-enabled applications on your PC and automatically sets security policies for each. This eliminates the endless pop-up boxes you get with many firewalls, wherein you must allow or disallow certain processes from accessing your machine. We appreciate the ability to fine-tune all aspects of network usage using rules, and the easy-to-analyze logs are another big plus. In our tests, the firewall demonstrated good performance, successfully blocking several Trojan horses from our PC. Agnitum Outpost Firewall Pro also enhances your Web-surfing experience by blocking pop-ups, Flash ads, and banners, as well as potentially dangerous elements on pages. However, the program isn’t perfect. The spyware protection introduced in the newest version didn’t prove very reliable in our tests, as it let some well-known offenders squeak through. It’s nice the program includes a spyware scanner, but it also wasn’t 100 percent thorough. Nevertheless, persons looking for a robust yet low-maintenance firewall should take a close look at Agnitum Outpost Pro–so long as they don’t uninstall their other antispyware programs.

Publisher’s description

Outpost Firewall Pro delivers proactive defense against hackers, spyware, Trojans, botnets, keyloggers, ID theft and other Internet-borne threats. The integrated anti-spyware module defends against the broad range of malicious programs. Its on-demand scanner enables scanning custom locations, while the real-time monitor is constantly on guard against the activation of spyware. File checks complete much faster because the SmarScan2-driven engine examines only items altered since the last scan. The firewall’s unique Attack Detection protects LANs against man-in-the-middle attacks and other sophisticated intrusions. The Host Protection module takes a new approach to combating malware: it pre-empts the infection by examining the behavior of a monitored object, proactively blocking it from performing any unauthorized activity. This type of defense-in-advance helps to halt unknown malware before it can activate its destructive payload.