BlackICE Defender is a personal firewall for your home PC. A firewall protects your computer from hackers. BlackICE is a firewall and it does its job.
It blocks attacks in real-time, reports attempted attacks and identifies intruders. Additionally, it secures your dial-up, DSL or cable modem connection to the Internet. In the past, personal PCs did not provide much of a point of interest for hackers to try to break into. But today home and small-business computers present numerous opportunities for hackers. The increased use of e-commerce means that more and more people store valuable information on their computers, such as, credit card numbers, account numbers, banking information, stock trading information and other items of interest to a hacker.
Because home computers are easy targets with very little in the way of sophisticated defense capabilities the hacking community has taken more of an interest in your personal computer. To help complicate this problem there has been a rise in the "always-on" Internet connections with the use of cable-modems and DSL connections.
Should you be concerned? Well I would definitely be concerned. Not panicked, but definitely concerned.
Previously stopping hackers meant purchasing expensive hardware or learning complex networking tools. Now that's no longer the case.
BlackICE Defender provides powerful intrusion detection and protection tools that are easy to use. When I say easy to use, I mean that. The installation does not require any sophisticated information about your system or connection to the Internet. First, your system must meet the minimum requirements to run BlackICE Defender. See minimum requirements below.
The installation follows the same procedures you are used to with any new program on CD. It is simple to install your own personal firewall and it is up and active protecting you from attacks.

What's under the hood?
Oh yes, the proverbial question: how does it stop Hackers?
The program employs a multi-layered defense mechanism. This multi-layered technology uses a seven-layer decode technology to detect, identify, and block attackers. It acts like a traffic cop. When it detects inappropriate access to your computer, it blocks all access from the offending location (the hacker's computer). Only those transmissions are blocked, other Internet access remains open and unaffected.
BlackICE Defender has a Summary Application that provides information about attacks.
The attacks tab. Provides an icon showing the severity of the attempted attack, the date and time of the attack, the type of attack, the intruders name (if available) or the Domain Name they came from or their Internet Protocol address if either of the previous two are not available, and a count of the number of attempts to perform the attack. Other column headings are available that you can select to display, but they show in other tabs and would only clutter up the clean form of the display on this tab.
The Intruders tab. Click on an attack line in the Attacks tab to display the details of that particular attack. The details can vary depending on how much information BlackICE could obtain during the attack.
History tab. Click on this tab to see a history of all the attacks against your system during either the last 90 days, hours, or minutes depending on which radio button you select.
Information tab. This displays your license when your support expires (nothing lasts forever) and information about the features that are provided in the version of BlackICE Defender that you are running.

Occasional false alerts
Understand that this is not a perfect application. It does sometimes detect normal network traffic from the Internet as an attack. I noticed this when I was exiting a game that I play over the internet and the server that I was attached to sent a number of UDP packets to my machine to try and reconnect me since it did not know that I intended to leave the server. This is routine network traffic but BlackICE thought it was an attack and reported it as such. In this case it was wrong but many other times it has been right and has stopped individuals from attempted access to my system. If it is only occasionally wrong then it helps me more than it hinders me and that is a step in the right direction.

Safe computing guaranteed
Remember one thing if you want to be entirely safe from any attack. TURN OFF YOUR COMPUTER and never run it again. You will be safe from attack, but if you need to use it and connect to the Internet this is a good start in keeping your system secure. It is not the only step that you can take, but it is a good first step and for the basic home user it will probably suffice in most cases.

Requirements. Windows NT 4.0 (Service Packs 4, 5, 6, 6a), Win 95, 98, 2000 (Service Pack 1), or Win ME. Pentium or newer. 16 MB memory. 10 MB on hard drive. TCP/IP Network Protocol. Network Connection: 10/100 Ethernet LAN/WAN, cable modem, DSL router, ISDN router, or dial-up modem.

Network Ice
www.networkice.com