Originally posted here by Info Tech Geek
Good Info PST,

I use Agnitum's Outpost and my Wireless Router/Firewall. I have not had much experience with Zone Alarm, but you say it does a word search for outgoing contect? I should look into this more. Does this content hit if you log into websites and is it allow once or always per site or per instance?

It does a text search in all outgoing packets, as well as incoming. In the zone alarm settings you can also tell it Which sites are okay to use that information, which sites banned, and whether to notify your or block by default. So that options as to what site it hits on and what sites are allowed is 100% up to you. In the case of the ebay password, zonealarm knows by default to check the URL and an SSL connection because of the configuration they included into it, so it knows what is ebay and what isn't already Even then, you can fine tune and configure that.


A sniffer records ALL the packet details..
All software firewalls are packet sniffers This is because they have to check incoming as well, and that means checking ports that packets are addressed to. The only way for software to know what ports is either to be the OS IP stack, or have a packet filter. Since windows is the IP stack, all software firewalls MUST be a packetsniffer to catch incoming data before windows. Sniffers don't mean they log, it means they sniff for readability and parsing inside the firewall program.