Customer Reviews

Black Ice Defender

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(11)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

in the past I have used many different firewalls. The famous "Atguard", Zonealarm, and now Black ice. I spent [$] on it, it said that it stops hackers cold. I frequently visit a web site called "shields up", it tries to probe your ports and test your security. using Black Ice, it was sucsessful in probing port 139, and NETBios. (thats not good), and I found that I was not in full stealth mode. Using the free Zonealarm firewall, all of your ports are in full stealth mode, however recent rumors suggesting that zonealarm may actually be spyware convinced me to get rid of it. In addition to Black Ice, I downloaded a free firewall called "Tiny Personal Firewall", it is very good, and makes my ports invisible, just as zonealarm. Another problem I had after intstalling Black Ice, is that my PC would just turn off, and I would get kicked off the internet often, also, since I have had it, it hasnt picked up a single hacker, and I have it set on "paranoid" mode, however the Tiny Persoanl firewall, has picked up, and blocked a number of attemps made by hackers to get into my system. If I could do it again, I would have saved my [$]. Dont but Black Ice. Download "Tiny Persoanl Firewall"....its good, and it's free! :)

This product works as advertised and provides excellent protection. I have had the internet hack sites try to break into my home machine and they fail every time. BlackICE is also configurable to meet almost any requirement. I do not understand the negative reviews as we have numerous machines running the product. I would much rather BlackICE stop a possible attack than let it continue.

BlackIce Defender is, well, adequate as a firewall. That's part of the problem - if you ask the company, you'll discover that that's not the purpose of the program. Instead, it functions more as an intrusion detection system. It is easy to install, and fairly easy to configure, but that's about all it does. It certainly stops low-level attacks, like port 80 scans, but if you get a more involved probe, like a SubSeven probe, BlackIce Defender doesn't block it. Instead, it lets the probe happen, then tells you that someone was looking for something but couldn't find it. That's kind of like having a car alarm that tells you when someone is checking out your car but decided it wasn't worth stealing (okay, it's not a perfect analogy).

Sure, you can block specific IP addresses, or allow only certain IP addresses ... but if you want to block every SubSeven probe, for example, you have to wait to be probed, then tell BlackIce not to let that person through again. Small consolation. Also, the interface that displays the most recent attacks is somewhat buggy - it wasn't unusual for me to be paging through attacks, blocking IP addresses who had probed me, when the list would suddenly shrink to the last 20 or 30 addresses. I'd have to flip back to the attacks page, page down a few times, and back to the address page

I received a Compaq Presario Notebook last Christmas as present. I began learning how to use it's various features. I have taken free trials of various internet services such as AOL to see which I would like best. I consider myself a computer novice and it was months before I realized that I needed Anti-Virus protection as well as hacker protection. So far I've subscribed to McAfee for my AntiVirus. For hacker protection, I downloaded the free basic ZoneAlarm program and then bought the CD software from Black Ice. I find that ZA and Ice work OK together. ZA acts like a doorman and whenever I'm on the internet and I want to download a free program, ZA always answers the knock and asks me if I will allow admittance. After allowing admittance I have found out that while downloading free programs, my Black Ice Defender will allow downloading but will block attempts by the downloading program to access my files and send back info to its source. I get a free download and my personal computer info stays in my computer and isn't allowed to be sent back for anyone's scrutiny. I feel that I have a guard at the door and a guard on patrol. I think the combination of the free zone alarm program and Black Ice Defender make for a dynamic duo that can stop hackers in their tracks. I recommend Black Ice as well as Zone Alarm but Black Ice keeps a detail record of all hacker type attempts as well as pointing a finger back to where the attack came from. I realize that one man's meat is another man's poison and that there are some computer users that may not like Black Ice. All I can say is that any defense is better than none and Black Ice is tough enough for the job needed.

I purchased a Black Ice product.
They offer ONLY email support.
They may take severals days to respond that they can't fix your problem.
There is ABSOLUTELY no way to get live help.
DO NOT BUY ANY BLACK ICE PRODUCTS unless you know everything there is to know about programming in any language written.

In short, buy anything else, this company doesn't derserve to be in business.

This program is very effective and easy to use, especially for the novice computer user, although I think even more advanced users think it's great. I was really suprised to see how many attacks were initiated on my system in just one hour. I recommend that everyone get this program, you'll be shocked at what you see going on. Don't think you can just buy things off the net without many people trying to access your computer. After the first day, I got rid of individual hackers who had computers set up to monitor the web for personal computers. Price wise it's definately worth the peace of mind.

Well if you like being asked if it is okay for Internet Explorer and Explorer in general can run every few minutes - this is the program for you. As for me it seems like these are programs that should not even be questioned. I upgraded from the old version to the new version, and trust me the old version was nice, but the new version is absolutely terrible. I'd kill for the old version. I'm switching to Norton firewall as soon as it arrives. My printer will now not print and I think this may be why. when I went on their troubleshooting site, there were all kinds of "yea we are aware of the problem, this is the work around", and you had to change various ini files, or whatever. I want a program that works not that I have to fix. I have it set on low to medium security, but be real the only thing left is to let ANYONE in. Go figure!!!

I work in a Govt Sector and we find the software Black Ice Defender Efficient Compared to Alarm Zone. We detected Approx about 100 scan were made on our systems thru The ADSL Line ( Digital Line) Users were trying got access our Confidential Data but couldn't get in. We were impressed that the software was actually working, Our Organisation Too writes in-house firewall programs for out system, but this One was really great. This is one software that is good to have around.

The only reason I don't give BlackICE a full five stars is because it doesn't offer some of the privacy features of personal firewalls such as Norton Personal Firewall--which provides controls for cookies and ad banners. As some of the reviews have mentioned, during testing some ports were found to be open. This indicates to me these individuals (Steve Gibson included) don't know how to configure the firewall software to achieve the desired level of protection. BlackICE has two features; a firewall for blocking traffic, a intrusion detection system for catching malicious types of traffic. It doesn't contain the application checking that some firewalls do but application checking is easily bypassed by a good backdoor or trojan application. Intrusion detection systems are a little more difficult to bypass. It is possible if you don't have the latest virus software, and you install an unknown application on your machine, that you could have a trojan resident on your computer. Since BlackICE doesn't block outbound traffic the slave software (trojan) would communicate with the master server but the intrusion detection system would most likely catch this and warn you of it. If you want a simple firewall use Tiny Firewall. If you want the benefits of a firewall with an intrusion detection capability choose BlackICE. If you are a home user who is concerned about privacy go for Norton Personal Firewall. And, in all cases, keep your firewall, anti-virus software and anti-virus definitions up-to-date.

I tried Black Ice Defender on my Gateway G-400 and it caused the computer to crash regularly. After contacting Network Ice by e-mail and making their suggested changes, my computer crashed less often (but still too often for my liking). I found the information about attempts to access my computer, provided by the program, to be incomprehensible and, therefore, useless. I don't recommend this program.