Free 24-hour ZoneAlarm Pro 2009 download

Need a firewall freshener? Tuesday marks Check Point Software's 15th anniversary, and to celebrate, it's offering free copies of Check Point ZoneAlarm Pro 2009 to all comers.

Check Point's anniversary promotion runs from 9:00 am EST today until 9:00 am on Wednesday, and includes a one-year license for one PC running Windows XP or Vista. The company will also offer an assortment of discounts on ZoneAlarm Antivirus, ZoneAlarm Pro, and ZoneAlarm Internet Security Suite.

ZoneAlarm, one of the category's more venerable titles, has evolved in recent years from a program that assumes the user is knowledgeable about potential threats to a program that can be adjusted to keep the civilians from being frightened by an overload of popups and queries from the software (let's call it "cancelorallowaphobia"). The SmartDefense Advisor is in this version able to configure proper access rights for over 2 million applications. ZoneAlarm also includes identity theft protections that keep a particular eye out for sensitive information such as Social Security numbers, and has an appealing "game mode" in which the software refrains from pestering you while you're at play.

ZoneAlarm Pro's had an interesting time of late in comparisons against other software firewalls. After a rough go of it for version 7 in the well-respected Matousec Firewall Challenge, the new 8.0.020.000 revision of the software blasted back in late September, scoring a robust 86% overall (PDF available here), which in Matousec parlance is a Very Good protection level rating. (The other two packages tested at that time, BitDefender Internet Security 2009 12.0.10.2 and McAfee Internet Security 2009 10.0.209, scored 7% and 12% respectively, which in Matousec parlance is a protection level rating of None.)

Test results for the current 8.0.020.000 version aren't currently available at the popular Test My PC Security site. The 8.0 version of the software was released in late August and normally sells for $19.95.