Sunbelt to Rescue Kerio Firewall
Anti-spyware company Sunbelt Software is expected to announce today that it has agreed to acquire the source code for Kerio Personal Firewall and that it plans to roll the popular firewall line into its products.
Kerio said last month that it would stop distributing free and pay versions of the firewall at the end of 2005 as part of a new emphasis on its corporate e-mail-security business. With Symantec's announcement just last week that it would discontinue the free and pay versions of Sygate personal firewall, the field of free personal firewalls for consumers was starting to look pretty narrow.
Sunbelt said it would announce shortly a reduced pricing for the full version of Kerio, and that it would continue offering a basic free version for home users. All Kerio users who paid for the full version can still receive support through Sunbelt once the acquisition is completed, the company said.
"We're really glad Sunbelt decided to continue what we have started, as well as their commitment towards developing the product even further," said Dusan Vitek, Kerio's vice president of marketing.
Update, 4:27 p.m. ET: Just a short while after Sunbelt's announcement that it would reduce the price of Kerio Pro firewall, Zone Labs issued a press release saying it was slashing the cost of its Pro version of Zone Alarm by 40 percent. Viva la' competition!
By
Brian Krebs
|
December 1, 2005; 2:40 PM ET
Categories:
Misc.
Share This: E-Mail | Technorati
| Del.icio.us | Digg | Stumble
Previous: FBI Warns of E-Mail Scam Touting PayPal Class-Action Suit
Next: Prostitution Suspect Used Data Access to Keep Tabs on Cops
Posted by: TJ | December 8, 2005 8:48 AM | Report abuse
The comments to this entry are closed.
Let's hope that Sunbelt does a better job with Kerio than they have done with their antispware program CounterSpy, which started out as a clone of MicroSoft's AntiSpyware - initially scoring well in several magazine reviews - primarily using detection definitions from Microsoft. When they attempted to include their own definitions, the program experienced a serious rash of false positive detections - mainly in the form of keyloggers. A further attempt to differentiate the program from Microsoft's has led to serious resource useage bugs.