>>>Actually Zone Alarm is the laughing stock of all hackers.
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>>What's your basis for saying this?
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>I've tested it and I've been able to get though it (eventually). There are various hacking groups such as The Cult of The Dead Cow and the Binary Assassins that regularly post security holes like these their sites. Zone Alarm seems to pop up a lot in some of these 'dark sites'.
>
>>>For those of you who haven't noticed yet it's pretty much possible to hack your way into almost anywhere.
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>>Ditto?
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>You can see all the things that are getting hacked into. infowar.com is one website that keeps up on Cypercrime....there are some other underground sites (some run by CyperArmy) that have a more detailed listing of current events. I've even seen screen shots and downloads of the windows 3.1 source. My feelings are that if you're online, you're at risk. Your best bet is simply to use firewalls, routers, script walls, virus scanners, etc. and pay a LOT of attention to who (or what) is moving what packets of info in or out of your machine or network.

One thing to bear in mind, this sub-thread started when a user new to broadband wanted to know more about the risks.

I agree that a hardware firewall is probably better protection than software like ZoneAlarm, but the main point is that ZoneAlarm is better than having nothing at all.

You're certainly entitled to your opinion of ZoneAlarm being a "laughing stock", but it would be more helpful if you could post URLs listing the problems, and even better, solutions if available.

"My feelings are that if you're online, you're at risk." True in a mathematical sense, in that risk can never be reduced to zero. But saying "it's pretty much possible to hack your way into almost anywhere" is FUD. Yes, if you're opening ports, running Web, FTP servers etc. you have to be very careful.

However, the typical home broadband user isn't doing this, and with a few basic measures taken as discussed elsewhere in this thread, such a machine or network will be difficult to penetrate. You seem to imply that if a determined hacker wants control of your machine/network, and your security is less than that of the NSA, you're going to get hacked - and that simply isn't true.