eEye Blink Personal Security Firewall
The best thing in life are free has echoed into the computer security
realm with the introduction of eEye Blink Personal which is intrusion
prevention, application and network firewall, identity theft
protection, and vulnerability assessment in a single, unified client
security solution. Very very impressive. Did I mention it's free for
personal use?
The installation begins with filling out a form on the eEye website confirming you are using the product for personal use, and agreeing to their privacy policy. The privacy policy emphasizes they respect your privacy and
don't sell or rent any information, including your email address which is great
from a product that let you use for free. This usually isn't the case. The
statement does go on to inform you it does collect statistical usage information
though.
During the installation, eEye detected that our previous
test of Norton had left Symantec application files, registry entries and other
residue all over our system. eEye successfully overcame this issue, cleaning up
Norton like any other virus/spyware. Did you know Norton makes a specific
"Removal Tool" to clean itself up? It can be downloaded here:
Norton Removal Tool
eEye finishes the installation asking for the serial number,
and asking you to fill out your personal information.
The performance of eEye is amazing. As soon as it launched,
it started alerting of outbound communication attempts their specific Application
Firewall was detecting. It gave me a time limit to grant the outbound communication
channel communication for this session, or make it a permanent rule before it
performed a default action of blocking the channel. Once I told eEye Blink
Personal to allow Microsoft Internet Explorer to communicate on port 80, and
make this a permanent rule, it launched the application firewall rules and
displayed all the rules in place.
I think it's important to point out how eEye differentiates
between application and system firewalls. This is a point Alcatraz Security has
been emphasizing for a long time. It is critical these days to engage applications
with a security device to police their actions. Traditional security
applications are static, and once you the owner of the system tells the static
security mechanism to trust Application X, it now has administrative rights and
can perform any action, update, installation, and communication it wants without
being blocked. The advancements, such as eEye Blink's application firewall
address this and create a smart, dynamic, security device that we need today.
But how well does it secure? Here are the results of our tests:
- Trojan Ports: PASSED - No open ports found.
- Ports 1 - 5,000: PASSED - No open ports found.
- Leak Test: PASSED - Stopped outbound channel.
- Exploits
- Nuke: PASSED
- Teardrop: PASSED
- Land: PASSED
- RfPoison: PASSED
It's conclusive, eEye Blink Personal is a secure system and application firewall. eEye earned Alcatraz Security's stamp of security approval. To get your own free edition follow the link below.
