Symantec Norton Personal Firewall 2006 review

There's not much you can teach Symantec about user interfaces.

Its Norton products always look great, and the latest personal firewall is no exception. It works well, too, and blocked all our attacks. It even detected the website probes, which puts it ahead of many of the other products tested here. There is a blocking feature for blacklisting systems that attack you, but we'd turn that feature off as it can be more trouble than it's worth.

By default it assumes that the local network is a safe home or office network, so if you are setting Norton up in a hostile environment you'll need to adjust the settings before plugging in a network cable or enabling a wireless network adaptor. It automatically sets up rules to allow Windows to use the internet, although it makes a song and dance about it, displaying messages to let you know that it's doing something useful.

We let Norton create a rule to allow access to the local web server, but it decided to permit access to the SMTP and FTP services, too. You need to edit the rule to close this hole. This can be tricky without instructions, and this rule customisation process is probably the weakest part of the program.

Not only did the firewall detect our web attacks, it even appeared to lie to our attacking tool, pretending not to be running a server. That is impressive, particularly as the marketing material doesn't even claim to offer IDS.

Norton Personal Firewall 2006 is a reasonably priced firewall if you buy it from a reseller such as Amazon.co.uk. Symantec sells it for £40 including VAT, which is not good value. If you can't find it cheaper, we'd recommend Kerio Personal Firewall, which lacks Norton's IDS but is still a good option.