Fire Wall

Could anybody recommend a good, preferably free, fire wall, other than Zone
Alarm please?
Many Thanks for any replies.

 

Kerio Personal Firewall
http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com

 

get a router

 

I have a router, does that make a difference?

 

Sygate Personal Firewall

 

That's a hardware firewall basically. that + the XP Sp2 firewall should
be enough, unless you are a crazy websurfer that goes to lost of porn
sites, then you should get a software FW like Kerio or ZA, etc.... with
outbound protection

 

Fergal wrote:

Depends on the router. However, like the Windows Firewall, the
router's firewall only handles unsolicited inbound connect attempts.
What features are available depend on the router brand and model. If
you don't have the manual for your router, go get a copy from the
vendor's web site. Then start reading.

 

Hello,

See
http://www.techsupportalert.com/best-free-firewall.htm

__
http://www.bootstrike.com/ComputerService/
Singapore Computer Home Remote On-Site Repair Service

 

isn't the main issue that we should tell all who venture here to keep
their windows machines fully patched and give up Internet Explorer and
Outlook express and use well developed open source products instead?

 

Depends. Most routers do NAT (network address translation) from the
routeable public IP addresses to private internal ranges. Which means, PCs
and other devices will not be visible or reachable from the outside - which
only sees the router.
However, there are backdoors like UPnP (universal plug&pray) and routers
listening to that may open ports for forwarding directly to a host inside.
That can be useful for accessing webservers inside, or sharing (p2p), but it
may open security holes as well - some malicious software/script received by
email or even web access, may exploit that. General recommendation is to
make sure your router has
- a strong password, do not leave the default
- remote maintainence access restriced to the internal LAN, never from
wireless or wan side
- applied the most recent stable firmware update if applicable
- UPnP set to off
- "stateful packet filtering" or similar settings left to "enabled"
- forwarded only vital service ports, to well secured pc's or devices inside

A "personal firewall" on a PC is compareable to a little nice-looking brick
wall built on a wooden desktop: basically useless.
Reason is, it brings no additional protection against incoming threats, just
notifies the user on outgoing requests of "unknown" programs and maybe
portscans.
Portscans are sometimes interesting to know of, but they do not introduce
danger by themselves.
Outgoing requests ... well, if a malicious program does that, it already has
installed and your system is already compromised. You are one (too many)
step(s) behind then.
What you really should do is tighten your settings:
do not run daily tasks, in particular surfing and mailing - internet access
- as a user of the administrators group. Create a "restricted" account for
daily work/surfing, and use "run as" or the admin account only for installs
and updates, connecting only to trusted sites, never open email attachments
as admin.
One of the most serious impeachments against Microsoft is, they still make
regular users members of the administrators group by default, even on the
latest windows versions. UAC is only a lame crutch to control the aftermath
of that big failure. They should have done like unix, from the beginning.

The built-in and hopefully activated windows firewall will suffice - or a
router.

 

Outpost firewall. Blocks applications use of the net, IP addresses,
specifies which sites can use scripts. On and on. Further to this
a router is neither a replacement for or any kind of parallel to
a software firewall.

 

Strongly disagree.

A good software firewall can block specified inbound and outbound
requests.

Many non-malicious programs make outgoing requests that are unneeded
or undesirable for the user.

Vista does that natively.

Not true with Vista.

Using both would be better.

 

Someone else here suggested Comodo firewall. I set it up on my laptop
with vista and it seems to be working just fine. I have bitdefender
av so I just use the firewall part of the downloaded file of 74 meg.

 

I've used outpost free http://free.agnitum.com/ for years, because it
is simple. It doesn't make everything sound like
your computer is under attack.

They came out with the 2009 free version and that is by far the
quietest least resource using firewall I've used

 

M. L. wrote:

Well, yes. But you can block incoming unsolicited requests with the NAT
router or standard windows firewall as well.
For outbound requests ... well, don't let them happen in the first place

You can configure flash or wmp, or set up a proxy unbeknownst to such
programs. And use wireshark to verify, if you are really paranoid.
A personal firewall will only catch parts of these outgoing requests -
mostly from "legitimate" programs. While malware tries to hide using IE
hooks or other means, or find ways to bypass the "firewall" completely.
Therefore, a personal firewall only makes you think you are safe, by
occasional warnings about usually harmless events. You tend to think "if the
firewall caught even that, it surely will find keyloggers and trojans, and I
can safely surf to any site on the web".
A bad mistake.
If I have to setup a windows box, I use a registry monitor such as s&d
teatimer, which does warn as well, but a bit earlierr - at the time the
malware tries to setup itself in the registry or autostart.

Ok, it UAC's them. Surely, better than nothing. But heard about the script
to trick out Windows7 UAC?

Well, at least in this case it doesn't harm.

 

Online Armor by tallemu.com . The standard free version works just as
fine. Things I like about it:

1. lighter than ZA.
2. ability to run apps trying to access the net in safe mode. denying
them access to system critical resources.
3. Its got both Program Guard as well as Firewall, so it prompts you for
new/unknown programs that either tries to get on the net or try to set
themselves to autostart with windows.
4. If you've used ZA and are familiar with usual firewall prompts you
should be upto speed with OA.

Diabolic Preacher
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