ZoneAlarm is an Israeli antivirus developed by CheckPoint.
Formerly based on the Kaspersky engine (discontinued following US sanctions), CheckPoint turned to the British company Sophos.
It also combines all the features seen in Harmony (Machine Learning, Cloud, File Reputation etc etc).
Let's see what it's worth together!
User interface :
ZoneAlarm's interface is clear, but rather messy for my taste. It's suitable for novices because... there's no configuration!
Just install and forget about it, and ZoneAlarm does the rest!
Admittedly, this user-friendly approach is well-suited to novices, as it takes them by the hand, which may annoy geeks.
In terms of RAM consumption, ZoneAlarm can be a bit of a power hog, and I did experience a few slowdowns...
Web protection: 9/10
Despite an undetected file (which mysteriously disappeared from memory), ZoneAlarm blocked all malicious downloads.
Surprisingly, ZoneAlarm did not block the links, but emulated the downloaded files using its extension!
This is a good idea, as it can scrutinize every bit of the file and determine whether it is malicious before it arrives on the computer, but this operation monopolizes a lot of resources on the machine...
Fake crack : 1/1
ZoneAlarm has blocked the installed files.
Malware Pack : Remaining 17 files out of 154.
ZoneAlarm combines Cloud, Machine Learning and the Sophos engine to detect malware, and let's face it, it's formidable!
At runtime, ZoneAlarm surprised us by managing to catch up with all the executions I ran!
Worse still, it even had the luxury of stopping attempted injections! Honestly, that's unheard of - congratulations CheckPoint!
It's just a pity that it alerts on each file, grouping them together would be much better.
Final scan :
Autoruns : 0
NPE : 0
MBAM : 0
KVRT : 2 (rest of JS detected, not active)
Final opinion:
ZoneAlarm is a pleasant surprise in the world of antivirus software. In just 1 year, the publisher has made enormous progress!
By combining a number of technologies (from Harmony), ZoneAlarm has given itself a more serious image and a new aura.
All that remains is to work on optimization, as ZoneAlarm is still rather heavy.
ZoneAlarm is highly recommendable.
@Trident and
@Jengo request