It seems that ZoneAlarm Security Suite has been phoning home, even when told not to. Last fall, InfoWorld Senior Contributing Editor James Borck discovered ZA 6.0 was surreptitiously sending encrypted data back to four different servers, despite disabling all of the suite’s communications options.
Zone Labs denied the flaw for nearly two months, then eventually chalked it up to a “bug” in the software — even though instructions to contact the servers were set out in the program’s XML code. A company spokesmodel says a fix for the flaw will be coming soon and worried users can get around the bug by modifying their Host file settings.
InfoWorld – ZoneAlarm phones home
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.
The company [Zone Labs] 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.
the Inquirer – Is your firewall spying on you? Zone Alarm gets rumbled
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