First Glimpse:- SoftSphere DefenseWall Personal Firewall 3.0

Hello and a very warm welcome to all my readers.  Today i am gonna tell you about one of the best security product “DefenseWall Personal Firewall“ by SoftSphere Technologies. I read quite a lot of good comments on it from Wilders Security forum.  So today i have decided to check out the latest version of  DefenseWall Personal Firewall version 3.0 myself.

It is an application which gives you a sandbox-style protection with your applications. It also provides you a strong policy-based HIPS (Host Intrusion Prevention System) as well as Personal Firewall protection too.

About Softsphere Technologies

SoftSphere Technologies was established in the year 2002 and consists of a team of highly specialized and experienced programmers. The organization is primarily active in the field of information security and their mission is to develop reliable means of protection against existing and future computer security threats.

One of the most important product of SoftSphere Technologies is “DefenseWall HIPS”, which i would like to discuss in this review in detail. According to Ilya Rabinovich, developer of DefenseWall HIPS aka DefenseWall Personal Firewall, it is a policy-based HIPS (Host Intrusion Prevention System) which protects oneself from various harmful software, such as spyware, botnets, adware, keyloggers or rootkits etc that cannot be stopped or blocked by your anti-virus or anti-spyware application while surfing over the internet.

Recently i have tested some new anti-virus software like Digital Defender and Zillya Antivirus. I was not able to share about Zillya AV because his developer requested me to analyze their new coming version, so i have not posted the test result here.

Anyways, today this is my first time testing on an HIPS software. DefenseWall Personal Firewall is not like other anti-malware products that you use to protect your computer system from various malicious softwares. Nowadays a number of viruses and other computer threats arrives from various mediums such as Internet, Intranet, email, flash drives etc.  In order to protect yourself from these threat you have to disable all the know mediums, but is it possible? No. It is really impossible because all these things are very important part of your computer system.

So what’s the DefenseWall have which other security products don’t have?  I must say Thanks to sandbox policy, virtualization and  strong restriction on all those application that comes from the same locations where virus can come in. It run all these application in an “Untrusted” mode with limited rights in a strong virtualized environment that is specially meant and allocated for them.

So in order to test it i have downloaded and installed DefenseWall Personal Firewall in my test machine. It is a customized PC having an Intel Quad Core 2.40 Ghz and 3 GB RAM. The operating system was Windows XP Pro with Service Pack 3 including all the latest updates.

Installation requires only 4 steps and it hardly take 5 seconds to install. YES believe me it only takes 5 Seconds.

Right after the installation, system restarts and DefenseWall shows a welcome window, which indicates the version of the package which you currently installed and prompts you for purchasing, entering the license code or testing the product.

As i don’t have the license key so i clicked on “Try now” button which gives me 30 days trial period to evaluate/test the product.

So soon after the installation i have started to test DefenseWall with various 0Day malware samples without changing the default configuration of DefenseWall. To my surprise all these samples were detected and executed as untrusted items and without compromising the system. Even i have tested the latest Zeus and TDSS rootkit samples which i have collected from various known shady sources, but both got failed to infect the computer system.

TDSS Rootkit after execution...Blocked by DefenseWall HIPS

I have not able to find any single  isolated malware that could able to bypass DefenseWall. As long as you run ANY untrusted or malicious software as Untrusted, your computer will remain alright. The only thing you have to do is to click the  STOP Attack button to get all the nasties out of your system.

Main Interface

What i found that DefenseWall HIPS is far better then today’s Anti-Virus softwares which are mainly depend on their signature database. But i still recommend you to  install a good Anti-Virus software along with DefenseWall, as it is NOT meant as a replacement for an Anti-Virus product but should be considered as being a supplement to an Anti-Virus.

Summing It Up

DefenseWall is really a innovative product which uses a new technology to fight with next generation nasty malwares. All-in-all I am overly impressed with the functionality of this application. It did its job for what I tested it with, and does it very smoothly.

Official Website:- http://www.softsphere.com/

Last But Not Least:-

DefenseWall 3.0 is ready show its  muscles !!!