FIREWALL SPYING ON YOU?

Is your firewall spying on you?



Paul Hales

http://www.theinquirer.net/


IT’S OBVIOUS, REALLY, that the best way of penetrating users' PCs to see what
they get up to online would be to become a Firewall maker.
Like, when I wanted a Firewall and was too tight to pay for one, I turned to Checkpoint’s
little freebie Zone Alarm. It sits there between you and the Internet and lets you
know when someone’s trying to sneak in through your backdoor or when a program you’re
running tries to connect to the Web for no apparent reason. When you’re as techie
as me – not very – you just have to trust it.

Of course, Checkpoint’s an Israeli company and as a foreign journalist working in
Israel you know the hyperactive security services here would like to keep tabs on
you. And you know that they do. It has been confirmed to me by a security sources
here that mobile phone conversations I have had have been listened to – and in circumstances
which I won’t reveal, the contents of a call I have been involved in have actually
been relayed back to me.

It’s part of the game – like the airport interrogation, or the surreptitious copying
of your notepad while you’re off having a body search. You know what goes on but
you have a job to do and just get on with it – hoping that what you get up to in
the legitimate pursuit of your business won’t upset anyone to the extent that they’ll
come break your door down and cart you off somewhere.

Now, the handsomely-named Mr Cringely has revealed that a colleague of his at Infoworld
noticed that Zone Alarm 6.0 was sneakily sending off data to four different servers.
Cringely says that Zone Labs (acquired by Checkpoint in March of 2004) at first
denied the activity for a couple of months before deciding the software had a "bug"
even though, as he points out, "the instructions to contact the servers were
set out in the program’s XML code."

The company says it will fix the "bug" soon. In the meantime you can work
around it by adding:
# Block access to ZoneLabs Server
127.0.0.1 zonelabs.com
to your Windows host file.

The "bug" seems to be present in the retail version of Zone Alarm, so
there’s no telling what the freebie gets up to. We called Checkpoint here in Israel
to find out, but were referred to a US spokeszoner. Trouble is they’ll all be in
bed there on this sunny Sunday morning. µ

Source: http://www.theinquirer.net/