A plea for user-friendly firewall messages

I consider myself to be reasonably technical, but even I struggle with firewall messages like this one:

Example firewall messageThis is a real screenshot from my company-supplied notebook PC. I don’t know what an integrity personal policy alert is, although I can hazard a guess. I certainly don’t know what triggag.exe is, but I can see it is trying a DNS lookup. Should I allow that? I don’t know, but I need to get on with whatever I did that launched that dialog so I click Yes (and probably tell it to remember the answer too).

According to file.net, triggag.exe is part of CA Unicenter Software Delivery but to an end user, this dialog might as well say “to carry on working you must make this dialog go away. Do you want to make this dialog go away?”

As long as the IT industry produces software which outputs messages as cryptic as this (and as long as administrators keep deploying that software), we will never get users to take security seriously.

Here endeth the lesson.

Comments

2 responses to “A plea for user-friendly firewall messages”

  1. emy avatar
    emy

    I agree with you fully. I’ve been searching for a more user friendly firewall but have not yet found one that speaks in plain english. If you know of a good one, please let me know.

  2. […] button (and the “don’t bug me again” checkbox) every time – which proves a point I made about firewall messages almost two years ago. And anyway, what’s wrong with the Windows Firewall? If I didn’t have to use Zone Alarm […]

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