In a comprehensive review of the new ZonaAlarm virtualized security environment that is ForceField, Roger Grimes praises the elegant user interface. While admitting to being a big fan of Check Point and the ZoneAlarm brand, Grimes remains skeptical of these kind of virtualization products and it would appear with good reason: because he reveals that the sandbox security client still allowed his test system to be compromised by malware within sixty seconds of browsing.
"ForceField did stop many malicious Web sites from loading and many malicious programs from being installed" Grimes says "it reported stopping more than 16,000 threats from the first seven sites I visited, but my network sniffer showed the true number to be below 60. I'm not sure how ForceField is counting threats."
The reviewer also discovered "many false negatives" and found that ForceField failed to prevent a number of malware infections. "One rootkit was installed as a service" Grimes warns "and several others installed using malformed multimedia content."