Kerio Personal Firewall

» see kerio.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

The version most people actually ran came out on 9 May 2003. The product it belonged to was switched off on 31 December 2011. Those two dates sit eight years apart, and for most of that gap the build being passed around was the old one. Kerio Personal Firewall 2.1.5 was the last free release, and when version 4 arrived wanting money for the full feature set, a large part of the user base simply did not move.

It was not Kerio's software to begin with. Tiny Software had been selling a personal firewall since the late 1990s, out of the same codebase that produced the WinRoute gateway, and on 1 February 2002 it transferred sales and development of the desktop product to Kerio Technologies, the Czech operation that had been doing the engineering anyway. What came out under the new name was a few megabytes of program that lived in the system tray and interrupted you.

Kerio left the consumer market at the end of 2005 to concentrate on small-business servers. Sunbelt Software of Clearwater, Florida picked the product up that December and shipped it as Sunbelt Kerio Personal Firewall, then quietly dropped the Kerio half. GFI Software bought Sunbelt in 2010, and in May 2011 it announced the end: final date 31 December, customers pushed toward a suite that included a firewall as one component. The reason given was not sentimental. The desktop firewall market had gone, and there was no sense in paying developers to serve it.

The two years this category mattered most, at least where I was, were 2003 and 2004, and the reason was worms. Blaster in August 2003 and Sasser the following spring did not need anyone to open an attachment. They arrived at an open port on a machine that was reachable, and plenty of machines around me were reachable and running an operating system that rarely got updated. A firewall was the repair you could install off a download list without waiting for a service pack to reach you. I was at university through that window, and it is when free firewalls became a standard line on every Turkish hardware forum's list of what to put back after a fresh Windows install.

~ the record ~

~ what the prompt was actually asking ~

The dialog named an executable and gave you two buttons. Underneath the wording, it was asking you to be the security policy for your own machine, in real time, with no context beyond a filename. Answering correctly meant knowing whether that particular process had a legitimate reason to open a socket at that particular moment, which is a question most people could not answer about their own computer and were not equipped to research at the speed the box demanded.

The rules you accumulated were the real product. After a few weeks the prompts thinned out and what remained was a table describing exactly which programs on your machine talked to the network. A small number of people read that table and learned more about their own system than any documentation had ever taught them. Version 4 added intrusion detection and web content filtering and got noticeably heavier, which is the other half of why 2.1.5 refused to die: it did one thing and it did not cost anything to keep running.

~ the handover ~

Four owners in under ten years, and the software barely changed hands in a way users noticed. Tiny Software to Kerio in February 2002, Kerio to Sunbelt in December 2005, Sunbelt to GFI in 2010, GFI to the end-of-life notice in 2011. Each transfer came with a rebrand and a promise that existing customers would keep their support, and each one moved the product a little further from the people who had originally built it.

Sunbelt did keep the promise longer than it had to. The product stayed in active development for years under a company whose main business was antispyware, and it was still being reviewed as a serious option well into the Vista era. What it could not survive was the operating system growing the feature. Windows XP Service Pack 2 turned on inbound filtering in August 2004 and Vista added outbound rules. By then most homes also had a router doing address translation, which answered the inbound question before the packet ever reached the machine.

~ end of life ~

The last act was a small gift. Before the December date, a beta of version 4.7.5 went out with exactly one change: the license check was removed. A product that had spent six years being sold ended its life free again, which is how it had started, and the final build kept circulating on download mirrors for years afterward with nobody left to patch it.

Kerio the company outlived its firewall by a wide margin. It renamed WinRoute to Kerio Control and MailServer to Kerio Connect in 2010, then sold itself to GFI Software in January 2017. The name still exists on network appliances. The consumer product it was best known for in the years when people learned what a port was has been gone since the end of 2011.

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