# General > General PC >  Zonealarm flagged their old firewall as malicious, along with 10 security vendors

## Peter Porter

I've been using an old version of Check Point's free Zonealarm firewall for over 10 years (call me crazy), which I've downloaded from their official website, and after reading about their 2010 scare tactic to get users to buy their antivirus...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZoneAlarm#Controversies

https://web.archive.org/web/20101104...ad.php?t=75332

...I decided to check their old firewall setup executable (version 10.1.101.000) with Virus Total, and after 59 scans with a host of security vendor's antivirus engines, it listed Check Point's Zonealarm antivirus along with 10 other security vendors reporting that Check Point's old Zonealarm firewall setup executable is carrying adware.

https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/...f93a2f36f0674d

Looking at the details, Virus Total reports that the executable's certificate is valid, signed by Check Point Software, VeriSign, and Thawte.

My guess, since Check Point got in trouble with their scare tactic of a global trojan threat to get users to buy their antivirus, this version of Zonealarm was gonna release this adware on a user's PC (might have happened to me more than once), in hope we would buy their antivirus since it's clearly visible on their firewall's dashboard, but listed as not included. No need to nag us about a threat. The Zonealarm firewall will just tell us that some strange executable is trying to access the internet.

So now I'm looking for a new firewall. Does anyone know of any good alternatives?

*Update, Dec 8th:*
I rescanned the Zonealarm firewall setup with Total Virus again, and it now shows 8 detections. My guess, Virus Total probably gets more traffic around this time, so some antivirus engines were busy scanning other submissions.

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## sapator

Ye that is a very slim chance of Check Point using a adware these days. We are using check point here so I wouldn't worry about check point.
If you want a simple firewall then stick with windows firewall. Some admins use it at home and they say it's "acceptable". I mean as long as you don't need to spend money.

Also that looks interesting: https://www.makeuseof.com/windows-fi...control-guide/
We've been tampered by some that malware is "old" , so we do the opposite and love it.  :Wink:

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## 2kaud

McAfee Web Advisor and Avast free

https://www.avast.com/en-gb/free-antivirus-download#pc
https://www.mcafee.com/en-gb/safe-br...ebadvisor.html

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## Peter Porter

> Ye that is a very slim chance of Check Point using a adware these days. We are using check point here so I wouldn't worry about check point.


I thought about trying their newest version of Zonealarm months ago. Not sure I'll go that route now. After all these years, they might have just gotten better at hiding crap within their software.

I'm gonna do a fresh install of it in a virtual machine to see what happens.




> If you want a simple firewall then stick with windows firewall. Some admins use it at home and they say it's "acceptable".


Windows firewall is a little too simple for me. If I can manually remove the bug from Zonealarm, maybe I'll stick with it.

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## Peter Porter

> McAfee Web Advisor and Avast free
> 
> https://www.avast.com/en-gb/free-antivirus-download#pc
> https://www.mcafee.com/en-gb/safe-br...ebadvisor.html


2kaud, I'm looking for a firewall alternative to Zonealarm.

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## Arnoutdv

Alternatives:
https://alternativeto.net/software/zone-alarm/

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## 2kaud

> 2kaud, I'm looking for a firewall alternative to Zonealarm.


Woops. However, the inbuilt Windows one is pretty good. Is that not adequate?

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## Peter Porter

> Woops. However, the inbuilt Windows one is pretty good. Is that not adequate?


Hey, 2kaud. Sorry to leave you hanging. I'm sticking with Zonealarm. I removed what was being flagged as a threat, and Zonealarm is still working fine. It has two dlls of the same name, for 32bit an 64bit systems, and since 32bit version was raising alarms, removing it hasn't broken Zonealarm on my 64bit system.

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