Taking steps to ensure that your PC is sufficiently protected against threats is a must these days, and there's a range of suites and tools around to help. What's frustrating is when you hear of a new ‘comprehensive' package designed to combat everything going, only to see a newer version released with ‘even more comprehensive' security.

Either this is partly PR spiel or people are discovering new ways of attacking computers every few months: in the case of the latter it's important to keep abreast of developments so you know you're sufficiently protected.

The latest buzzword in terms of Internet threats (although it's actually been around for many years) is phishing, the act of fraudulently acquiring sensitive information such as passwords, credit card information and other user details. Most decent suites will offer some level of protection here, but ZoneAlarm's new Forcefield application promises this along with quite a bit more.

It's designed to work alongside conventional security software and includes keylogger and screen-grabber jamming, safety checks on file downloads, spy-site blocking, site rating and spyware scanning. Other suites do offer many of these benefits but what makes Forcefield unique is the type of virtualisation used to protect your system.

This is where a virtual environment is created while browsing the Internet so that any changes to your system are made to this area and not to your actual files. Forcefield is allegedly the first of its type to adapt to how users work rather than forcing changes upon you, which often has overheads on system performance.

It prevents your Web browser from modifying system files or the registry, as well as storing temporary files and other Web material in a virtual storage space rather than your temp folder, where they potentially have access to the rest of your system.

This is the ‘lite' explanation of how the software works; we'll save you a more verbose description of security terminology and get into how the software actually performs.

After a short download and installation it integrates with your Web browser - there's support here for Firefox and Internet Explorer - and you'll find a ZoneAlarm Forcefield toolbar appear following installation. There are three simple buttons: an application control that offers access to a few basic settings, protection activity that tells you what threats and potentially harmful data have been stopped, and a site status control that changes colour to indicate the safety level of the site you're browsing.

It's a simple layout and most of the functionality of the package is automated, which is no bad thing, though after only a few minutes of use we noticed that around 50MB of potentially harmful data had been stopped from accessing our system, which is quite a worrying - and unexplained - statistic. We saw no overheads in terms of performance and the software doesn't place any restrictions of note on your typical browsing session.

By default when you start a new Web browser, the software kicks in and enables a ‘private session', which means that no history will be logged, no cookies kept and no trace of your current session will be stored on your computer. If you want to browse normally you can choose to load an unprotected browser from the main menu on the system tray, which also gives you access to more options for configuring exactly how the software works.

When you do encounter a threat, you'll be advised of exactly what the problem is and given the option to proceed anyway or delete the offending file and browse away from the offending site. There's no doubt that the advantages offered by the software do offer peace of mind, and while many of its tools appear to be covered by rival suites, the way in which Forcefield protects you does seem more innovative and offers a number of advantages.

ZoneAlarm Forcefield is nicely automated, unobtrusive and doesn't force itself upon you, in that you can choose to browse normally if you want to. There appeared to be no significant overheads on the system in terms of performance, and based on the results we saw it's something we'd much rather have on our system than not.