Zone Labs: Anatomy of a Coverup

How angels stay clean and scandals stay silent.

Part Eight - Let's Talk About Nothing

Part of the Gibson strategy for keeping the hysteria pot warm was the creation of news groups where wannabe slash-dotters and totally paranoid survivalists could hang out and pass meaningless niceties and unpleasantries back and forth. And of course the word got out all the time about Zone Alarm, and of course Zone Alarm had its own news group and even its own FAQ section and soon would even have its own customer care representative installed at GRC. It was a wonderful time.

Some of the groupies started thinking up strategies for sneaking past Zone Alarm's filter on outbound traffic. None of them had ever read Gregor's patent application, and even if they had they wouldn't have understood it, so they figured - and rightly, as it turned out - that if you could fool Zone Alarm into thinking you were a legit application then you could get out.

What is unfortunate here is that, as anyone can see, Gregor's initial design as outlined in his patent application deals with this contingency. Yet for some reason Zone Alarm had failed to implement it. So John McAfee set to work again.

1. Get Gregor and the other monkeys to put in complete authentication on application identification.
2. Have Steve Gibson devise a new Leak Test which could fool all the other personal firewalls.
3. Stir the pot again - create the hysteria.

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