20 Nov 2001 20:16:34

Smoke Gets In Your Eyes: None of what Gregor writes here is true.

   From: Gregor Freund
     To: Tom Liston
   Date: Tue, 20 Nov 2001 20:16:34
Subject: RE: OutBound / ZoneAlarm / LaBrea@Home

Tom:

I appreciate your frankness. I might have attributed some statements 
by Wired Online to you - for that I apologize. Please don't forget 
that we were contacted by Wired with the statement that our product 
is lacking basic protection.

I never stated that there might not be a problem in ZoneAlarm, I 
only denied that:
- It was a systemic issue (as opposed to a fairly simple bug)
- That we would have to re-architect the product (which we don't)
- That ZoneAlarm is lacking a low-level filtering mechanism
  (without it, we wouldn't be stealth)

I never said anything about missconfigured.

I never said we passed all the tests, only that we had mixed results 
with different configurations. Essentially it came down to how the 
driver was installed. The old version of the packet driver was not 
dynamically loaded and didn't show the problem.

Here is what it's coming down to:

The packet driver you're using is rapidly binding and unbinding to 
adapters even before it actually tries to send data. ZoneAlarm is 
normally ready for this kind of stuff - for example if you plug in a 
new network card we automatically protect that card as it goes live. 
We had a bug that under some limited circumstances we missed the 
'unbind' and when the adapter gets bound again to packet.vxd we 
would assume that we already monitor the binding. That's fixed. \

I talked to the QA engineer that worked on this and he did a series 
of tests turning ZoneAlarm off and on to make sure that the test 
still worked and we don't get false positives.

We are now building a new beta version and if everything holds up we 
should have a beta build by tomorrow. I will send you a copy when 
that's ready.

I didn't realize your dependency with the release of LB@Home. I 
would appreciate if you would hold back on it until we have the 
fixed certified and released - it normally takes a week to ten days 
to get through all the release testing.

I hope this clears up the misunderstanding. Please don't hesitate to 
call me on my cell phone or in the office, should you have any more 
questions.

You help in this matter is truly appreciated.

Best Regards,

Gregor

------------------------
Gregor Freund
CEO, Zone Labs, Inc.
1060 Howard Street
San Francisco, CA 94103
http://www.zonelabs.com
+1 415 341-8202 (direct)
+1 415 341-8200 (office)
+1 415 558-9161 (mobile)
+1 415 723-7297 (fax)

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