I haven't used Zone Alarm in a while and so missed when the story broke. However; it appears ZA phones home to servers controlled by Zone Labs. No one has given a satisfactory explanation of why this behavior was coded in, to the best of my knowledge. There are four servers involved.
This little article in The Inquirer details how to block this behavior, using the hosts file in ZA itself. It's easy to implement.
Jack
I tried to add the entries to my hosts file, and kept getting "This file is in use by another program.....," so I went searching for solutions and found the following press release at Zone Alarms. My initial impression is not to trust the exe file. But, I'm about to reboot in safe mode to see if I can add the additional entries to my hosts file then. spybot's host protection is not on, and I turned the DNS service off, amazingly my internet surfing wasn't affected, but I couldn't rename hosts.
ReplyDeleteJoin the chat later today, to find out if I did. :)
Zone Labs: Press Release