Comodo Firewall Pro is a free personal software firewall. While I appreciate the fact that it’s free, I must say that it has been driving me mad. I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone at this stage just yet, but I wouldn’t stop you from trying it either.

This whole thing started a few weeks ago when I rebuilt my system. A scan revealed that the pirated firewall I had been using for the last few years came with a malware. Now, this is not the first time I discovered a malware-infested pirated software. In fact, I once installed a pirated antivirus which itself is infected with a virus. What an irony. You would think me being the security conscious person that I am would have learnt my lesson but obviously that wasn’t enough. But after discovering the malware in the seemingly clean pirated firewall I had trusted for ages, I finally learned that you can’t trust any pirated software, especially pirated security products. What easier system to infect, than one without security protection.

Now, I’m not about to reveal the full security setup of my machines. Even though I have a bunch of security measures in place, the reality is that all softwares have bugs. I should know as I’m a software developer. Revealing my machine setup would make them much more susceptible to attack. Since I’m reviewing the Comodo firewall, you now know I have that running on my system. Or do I still?

I quite like Comodo firewall because it is highly configurable. It supports five different levels of protection ranging from Disabled to Paranoid Mode. I’m not paranoid about security so instead I run it in the Train with Safe Mode. What I soon found out is that when you put the firewall into training mode, it in turns put you in training mode. It is not particularly user friendly and a lot of the tasks require you to navigate through numerous menu items. There are a few quirky behaviours as well, and until you learned them, life would be hell.

All in all, I would say the training mode is overly annoying. That is a really bad thing as it requires the user to be constantly alert. A moment of lapsed concentration could cause the user to make a bad call. While it has a rather rich feature set already, I believe Comodo still has some way to go yet to make the firewall a truly usable product.