A great program for protecting your computer from hacker attacks and trojan horses. Not only does it cut out unneeded ads (those obnoxious banners that happily flash, splash, fade in and out, twirl, swirl, blink, and link to useless sites) and selectively block cookies (the teensy weensy little files that are placed on your computer's hard disk every time you visit most websites) and referrers (i.e. where you came from), but this is also a personal firewall - a protection shield between your computer and the Internet.
ATGuard's operating principle consists in monitoring all Internet connections and, based on respective settings, the program either allows a connection or forbids it. In case of an external attempt being made to connect to your computer, ATGuard alarms you and waits for you to decide whether you allow this connection to be made. ATGuard also alarms you if any application installed on your computer attempts to access the Internet. Thus your computer is perfectly protected from trojan horses (even if the trojan installs itself onto your computer, it can never connect to the Internet because ATGuard does not allow it to make a connection). Besides that, ATGuard is capable of selectively blocking Java, JavaScript, ActiveX, and it keeps logs of all the above-mentioned actions. Unfortunately, the developers ceased the development of the program, having sold their rights to Symantec.