For what it's worth, BlackICE had a pretty poor reputation in the past, but then NetworkICE (the developers of BlackICE) was bought by Internet Security Solution (ISS) back in 2001, and it has vastly improved in popularity amongst security professionals since that acquisition.
I work in IT Security for a major high-street financial institution, and I know of many banks and financial organisations that use ISS tools
In fact, ISS is one of the world's most reknowned security specialist companies. They specialise in enterprise-level solutions, such as Intrusion Prevention/Detection Systems, network-based firewalls, etc... and are damned good at what they do. Check
here for SC Magazine's (
the Security Industry's trade magazine) review of RealSecure. Admittedly, it's not a review of BlackICE, but RealSecure got a five-star review, and not many products get such an accolade from SC Magazine.
Incidentally, you may have heard of the recent presentation that Michael Lynn gave at this year's Black Hat Conference detailing the flaw in Cisco's IOS that could bring the backbone of the web to it's knees... well, Lynn worked for ISS until the morning of his presentation (whereby he resigned to give the presentation without causing liability to ISS).
Unless your budget can stretch to the ISS
RealSecure Desktop Protector then you can't get much better than BlackIce.
As to your question of disabling ping, ssh and http ports... erm, I'm afraid I don't actually use BlackICE so I don't know how to do it
but as it would use a 'default deny' policy, I'd have thought that there is a program that has been granted access on these ports, so check to see where you can modify the program access control list (or some similar option). If you get really stuck, then I could always install it and have a look for you
