McAfee Personal FireWall Plus Review

McAfee Personal Firewall Plus is another useful security tool from the creators of McAfee Antivirus. This firewall offers a wide set of well-thought out advanced features and it becomes a formidable security tool in the hands of an experienced user. However, the fact that McAfee Personal Firewall Plus is known for letting some adware through limits its usefulness somewhat, especially for less experienced users who are unable to take advantage of McAfee's full capabilities.

Interface and configuration

The interface used in McAfee Personal Firewall Plus is generally easy to manage and it is intuitive. Even inexperienced computer users are able to manage McAfee Personal Firewall without a problem, at least on a basic level.

McAfee Personal Firewall Plus is easily configured, though some changes can be made only during the setup phase. If you want to change, for example, your type of Internet connection, you have to run the Setup Wizard - there is no other way to change that particular setting. Nevertheless, configuring McAfee Firewall is a relatively easy task - the whole process (managed by a setup assistant) is done step-by-step rather than leaving you alone with all the configuration options.

Features

The main features of McAfee Personal Firewall Plus include the standard options (monitoring all network traffic, system registry protection, port monitoring, stealth mode, etc.) less the email protection - emails are scanned only as a part of incoming/outgoing network traffic.

In addition to all the features you would expect, McAfee Personal Firewall Plus offers several extremely useful attack detection and hacker identification tools. McAfee is able to track the attack to the point of its origin - to the point where you can get enough evidence to actually convince you ISP to take action against the offender!

Another interesting feature is McAfee's ability to block a specific IP address or a whole range of IP addresses. It is an excellent method of protection against further intrusions - everything that came, or will come, from this blocked address will be ignored, effectively negating the hacker's attempts to break into your system.

Effectiveness

Just like most firewalls, McAfee Personal Firewall Plus provides a reasonable protection level and stops all incoming intrusions, but does not hide the "footprints" you leave during browsing. Also, it does not hide your system information from other people, making your system easier to identify and target. This is a big hole since everyone wants to be invisible from hackers.

Summary

McAfee Personal Firewall Plus is an interesting security tool that bundles well with other McAfee security programs. It is clear, however, that McAfee's firewall was created with more experienced users in mind. Novices may want to choose a less complex firewall for starters. Luckily, there are many different programs out there to cater to the novice user. But don't be scared off by how advanced this program is, it can be used as a great way to learn the ins and outs of firewalls and who better to trust than one of the most trusted names in Internet security: McAfee.