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Check Point Launches ZoneAlarm Free Antivirus and Firewall 2013

7th May 2012 by 5 Comments

Once upon a time, ZoneAlarm was the best personal firewall available. It was free, stable and excellent. I seem to remember using it from 2002-2003 or so – then Zonealarm was acquired by CheckPoint and the product was lost to the retail market. CheckPoint moved the product to corporate desktops and was lost to the retail market.

Now, CheckPoint is returning to the retail market. Which is decidedly odd. CheckPoint has never been interested in doing anything for free or sharing at all. Their tech-support is legendary for being remote and unhelpful, their involvement in the security community has been accidental at best and the company exist in a an ivory tower of secrecy, paranoia and highly profitable firewalls that are hard to get rid of.

So, I wonder why CheckPoint is giving something away now ? What’s changed ?

Check Point launches ZoneAlarm Free Antivirus and Firewall 2013.

Filed Under: Blog, Opinion, Security Tagged With:
About Greg Ferro

Greg Ferro is a Network Engineer/Architect, mostly focussed on Data Centre, Security Infrastructure, and recently Virtualization. He has over 20 years in IT, in wide range of employers working as a freelance consultant including Finance, Service Providers and Online Companies. He is CCIE#6920 and has a few ideas about the world, but not enough to really count.

He is a host on the Packet Pushers Podcast, blogger at EtherealMind.com and on Twitter @etherealmind and Google Plus

  • Brannen Taylor

    Best summation of Checkpoint ever.

  • http://twitter.com/steve Steve Rossen

    I am tempted to test this out as it was great back in the day. However I am worried what CheckPoint has done to it. I really had no idea it was still around all these years.

  • http://twitter.com/nemesisgy Jason Harry

    They said they’re hoping to make profit on it but encouraging users to download it and then eventually hoping they’d update to premium packages. Also, the free version only updates it’s signatures hourly whereas the premium packages update as soon as signatures are available. 

  • http://twitter.com/routeleaker Roy

    Zone alarm has been available for some time now. I’ve been using it since the Checkpoint acquisition on some of my laptops over the year(s). I prefer Kaspersky however.

  • Will

    Wow!  That’s funny.  not about zone but about CP firewalls and the CP ethos.