ZoneAlarm

Katerina_sa

Good evening,

Last week just out of the blue I couldn't access the internet. The wireless was on and the router seemed fine but for some reason there was no access to the internet. I contacted Netgear (i've got a netgear router) and they advised me to remove Zone Alarm as this was the problem. I've been using ZoneAlarm for a few years now and i never had problems with it. I removed Zone Alarm as i was advised and the connection was absolutely fine. Tonight i started getting pop up windows (casino ads, online cash) and AVG detected a Trojan. I got panicked, so I downloaded Registry Mechanic, which detected a few problems and said that there are some more which cannot be fixed and I also downloaded Comodo Firewall which scans my laptop right now.

Would you know why Zone Alarm went crazy? Should I install it again? Is there something else I should download?

Thank you for reading my message.

Have a good night
Katerina

Marty_J

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7499260.stm

Seems to be all fixed now.

Katerina_sa

thank you very much guys. It makes sense now. I'll reinstall zonealarm (as i think it's very good) and i'll run all anti- virus, spyware, social stuff I can get.

thanks again
katerina:j

chaddy7604

Had this problem last week

DD's lappy wouldn't connect to the web at all

I knew the router and network where okay because the Mac was working fine

tried all sorts to fix, it eventually doing a system restore to a point few days earlier which cured things

but tonight DD said again she couldn't connect to the web, again the mac was fine

so after faffing about with her lappy I eventually wittled it down to Zone Alarm being the cause of it all

I came to the forum to post a help question, arrived here to find this thread all about it :j

hadn't seen anything about it before then, so just downloading the newest Zone Alarm update

(I actually hate microsoft sh!te software, which was the underlying cause of all this)

Gimme the Mac and OS X any day :j :j :j

Marty_J

I had to laugh about Microsoft saying no one had contacted them about this.

Considering it stopped those affected from using the internet, I'm not surprised. It's a little like Royal Mail taking all the post boxes away and then saying no one has complained as they haven't had any letters about it!

chaddy7604

Just finished updating everything it seems fine now

esbo

Funny I am sure I looked at the ZA site a few says ago and they did not appear to
have a fix, although they do now apparently, it was definately after the 11th.

[Deleted User]

chaddy7604 wrote: »

(I actually hate microsoft sh!te software, which was the underlying cause of all this)

I think you'll find it was a flaw in the DNS protocol that required collaboration across the industry to ensure that no matter what platform a computer was running that it wouldn't be vunerable was the cause of this incident.

It was poor design on the behalf of ZoneAlarm that caused users to have issues. Funny how no other mainstream firewall producer didn't stop their users getting onto the internet eh? It's easy to blame Microsoft because there has always been and always will be a bandwagon to jump on no matter what they do, especially from the Mac camp..

esbo

Well I just downloaded and ran the ZA update and got a bit of a shock.
When I rebooted after the install there was a lot of disk tthrashing as I expeced
after the install but the screen remained blank.
After the thrashing had finished it was still blank and I was worried, so I left it ten
minutes, still blank :eek:.

I tried rebooting into recovery but that didn't seem to work, it said it could not recover
and that I needed to reboot into recovery mode or something. (which I had just done).

Anyway I took a chance and rebooted normally and it seemed to work, screen working and desktop appeared :j

The ZA set-up thing (set-up) came one and I went through it but I quit it when it asked to automatically configure my firewall (I didn't thrust it anymore :cool:)

So it is all fine now apart from the auto-config, but it seems 'configured' anyway, it
has the list of programs and firewall options for them.

I am not sure what happened but it seemed like it had used my old graphics card
drivers (I got a new card a week ago), when I installed that I got the same
blank screen, however now I remember, I sorted that by checking cables and
that the memory was seated properly (and cleaned the motherboard a bit).
So the graphic card drivers 'thing' might be a red herring.

So I just though I would mention that incase anyone has a similar experience


(I just googled it)
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=200265
http://forums.zonelabs.com/zonelabs/board/message?board.id=access&message.id=34454

However they seem a bit old and not the same anyway.
Maybe it was just some weird coinicidence? Bit of a mystery really.

esbo

be_alright wrote: »

I think you'll find it was a flaw in the DNS protocol that required collaboration across the industry to ensure that no matter what platform a computer was running that it wouldn't be vunerable was the cause of this incident.

It was poor design on the behalf of ZoneAlarm that caused users to have issues. Funny how no other mainstream firewall producer didn't stop their users getting onto the internet eh? It's easy to blame Microsoft because there has always been and always will be a bandwagon to jump on no matter what they do, especially from the Mac camp..

You could look at it another way, maybe before the update all the other firewalls had a a whopping big holes in them, which only ZA blocked, and that when MS fixed the bug and started using those ports ZA was blocking then it blocked ZA users internet access?

esbo

esbo wrote: »

Well I just downloaded and ran the ZA update and got a bit of a shock.
When I rebooted after the install there was a lot of disk tthrashing as I expeced
after the install but the screen remained blank.
After the thrashing had finished it was still blank and I was worried, so I left it ten
minutes, still blank :eek:.

I tried rebooting into recovery but that didn't seem to work, it said it could not recover
and that I needed to reboot into recovery mode or something. (which I had just done).

Anyway I took a chance and rebooted normally and it seemed to work, screen working and desktop appeared :j

The ZA set-up thing (set-up) came one and I went through it but I quit it when it asked to automatically configure my firewall (I didn't thrust it anymore :cool:)

So it is all fine now apart from the auto-config, but it seems 'configured' anyway, it
has the list of programs and firewall options for them.

I am not sure what happened but it seemed like it had used my old graphics card
drivers (I got a new card a week ago), when I installed that I got the same
blank screen, however now I remember, I sorted that by checking cables and
that the memory was seated properly (and cleaned the motherboard a bit).
So the graphic card drivers 'thing' might be a red herring.

So I just though I would mention that incase anyone has a similar experience


(I just googled it)
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=200265
http://forums.zonelabs.com/zonelabs/board/message?board.id=access&message.id=34454

However they seem a bit old and not the same anyway.
Maybe it was just some weird coinicidence? Bit of a mystery really.

I rebooted and it did it again, blank screen, I rebooted into recovery again, but as before I did nothing I just typed exit at the 'windows :>' prompt.
I Rebooted into normal windows and all seems OK again.

Does that mean it had done a recovery before I typed exit?
It did not seem to do anything, I have never one into recovery mode before so
I don't know what to expect.