Agnitum Outpost 2

Highly Commended - Personal Computer World.

One of the less well-known personal firewalls, Agnitum's Outpost Personal Firewall Pro 2 uses an interface that's designed to make users of Microsoft Outlook feel at home straight away, with a main summary screen and an expandable tree down the left side.

Installation was simple, and Outpost correctly detected the home network we were using, though by default it doesn't trust machines connected to it. Thankfully,making the change to allow file sharing is simple. Your PC is also scanned during start-up to detect known Internet applications, so they can be granted permission without you having to click on each one in turn. While very quick, some of our key applications, such as Net Objects Fusion, weren't detected.

Like most of these firewalls, attempting to run an unknown program that connects to the net results in a pop-up, although they're not as eye-catching as those in some of the products tested here. You can click to create rules based on a pre-set or create your own advanced rules. Doing that is simple and works in the same way as Outlook's rules, so you build up a rule by picking options, ending up with a proper written description of what's happening in the same window.

The program uses a plug-in architecture, with plug-ins included to block adverts, manage active content and even filter net access based on keywords contained in pages - it's not complete content filtering, but it's a useful safeguard. Third-party plug-ins include 'whois' lookups and web activity logging, though we didn't have time to test these.

Security scans showed the system to be fairly good at hiding the PC from the net, and at disguising the operating system being run; you can also arrange to block an IP address or a whole subnet when an intrusion such as a port scan is detected.

Contact: Agnitum 0121 311 2858
www.agnitum.com

System requirements:

• Windows 98-XP
• Pentium 200MHz
• 20MB of free disk space
• 32MB Ram

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