Currently i am using windows firewall, but i have been told that i should use a better one for example comodo. Is windows firewall good enough or should i change? Personally i’m happy with windows firewall but i would like some views on the subject before i make a final decision.
This question has been asked and addressed many times here in the forum. 
If you use the search function the forum has here, type in “firewall” you will get quite a few opinions that may answer your question. 
That is a Myth. The XP SP2 firewall is excellent: XP Myths
Unfortunately it’s not a myth that the Windows Firewall only protects incoming traffic unless
you’re already using Vista.
Hi JJ,
Please read my post at the link below for a better understanding of why you need a firewall with both inbound & outbound control.
http://forum.avast.com/index.php?topic=20921.msg175125#msg175125
Unfortunately, Windows XP firewall only gives inbound control. There are several ways for a computer to get infected. Inbound from the Internet is only one of those ways.
JJ;
You always have ZA Free which I use and have always used with no problems.
Light on resources, too. This is true for my version which is not the last one.
It is impossible to guarantee outbound protection on any Windows XP computer. One a file has administrative access it can get around any “outbound” protection at will.
Windows Firewall: the best new security feature in Vista?
Promoting that users need outbound protection so they do not get infected is nothing but FUD.
It is impossible to guarantee outbound protection on any Windows XP computer. One a file has administrative access it can get around any "outbound" protection at will.
That depends on the sophistication of the firewall, and how well it protects itself and blocks outbound connections. Modern third party firewalls attempt to do both. Empirical results show some success:
An interesting point from the recent review of anti-virus software. One AV running with Windows firewall missed a Trojan which was able to disable the firewall:It ignored several Trojans, one of which successfully disabled the Windows firewall, allowing potential attackers remote control of the system.http://www.computershopper.co.uk/labs/220/anti-virus-exposed/products.html
Zone Alarm AV also missed some Trojans, but as it includes ZA firewall the story was different:
The anti-virus scanner missed four of our Trojans. But when one tried to contact the internet the firewall stopped it.http://www.computershopper.co.uk/labs/220/anti-virus-exposed/products.html
http://forum.avast.com/index.php?topic=20986.msg176258#msg176258
Windows firewall makes no attempt to protect itself, storing settings in the registry where they are easily altered by malware:
http://www.spywareinfo.com/newsletter/archives/2005/oct27.php#winfirewall
There is no guarantee that a third party firewall will guarantee outbound protection. However there is a 100% guarantee that Windows firewall won’t protect from outbound protection.
Promoting that users need outbound protection so they do not get infected is nothing but FUD.
Ha! This from the FUD Meister himself.
Agreed, but that’s no reason for not using outbound protection.
Analogy is using an antivirus, it’s no guarantee againt viruses at all.
This is another layer of defence and the most impotant tool is still your brain.
I regularly take a ‘known to be good’ image of C to another partition.
In addition I hide that partition from me and windows. Yes, I have imaged back
a lot of times to completely undo things I have done.
But guarantee… no, just another level of protection.
You are doing people a disservice irrationally recommending a Firewall with “outbound” protection. Once you are infected you are infected and a well written virus or malware can circumvent ANY Firewall on XP running as an administrator. That is an irrefutable FACT. No matter how much you want to believe that your “outbound” protection is keeping you safe it is NOT!
People need REAL security advice like making sure all Windows Security Updates are applied and they are running an updated Anti-Virus program and Anti-Spyware program.
I have been doing this for over 15 years and deal with this daily, outbound protection hasn’t protected anybody from anything. Don’t get me wrong power users may enjoy the application control and advanced logging but the average user doesn’t need anything more than the built-in Firewall.
There is a lot of poorly written and unsophisticated malware out there and a good firewall will offer protection against that.
My car seatbelt won’t save my life if I drive my car off a cliff, but it will help me in most fender-bending situations so I still wear it.
How does the outbound protection help you here? You are already infected! Windows Defender is a better solution for “poorly” written Spyware by PREVENTING you from getting infected in the first place!
Unfortunately, there isn’t any software out there that will totally prevent you from
getting infected. Since the cure is always written after a new malware appears, protection or
prevention always lags behind a new outbreak.
All the user can really do is to plan ahead by creating a reliable recovery strategy and by practicing safe surfing
in the first place. IMHO
If i was to download another firewall like zone alarm would i have to uninstall the windows one?
Mastertech is right or course - I’m going to uninstall my firewall immediately.
I’m also going to stop taking the antibiotics that have been fighting my chest infection. It was irrational of my doctor to suggest that they could at least stop the infection getting any worse.
Are Microsoft moving into healthcare anytime soon?
What does this have to do with the firewall discussion ???
No you can’t but you can disable it. Now you need to ask why you are installing it. Because if you are trying to stop from getting hacked than Windows XP SP2’s Firewall will do that. If you think it will stop you from getting infected, no more than Windows XP SP2’s firewall. All it will do is provide better logging and more application control over what programs access the Internet, when and how. It will slow down your internet and PC performance.
The fact is everyone should use a Firewall and the XP SP2 Firewall is more than sufficient for the average user.
If i was to download another firewall like zone alarm would i have to uninstall the windows one?
No. Zone Alarm and most other firewalls will disable Windows firewall when installed.
http://donaldbroatch.users.btopenworld.com/za1.jpg
http://donaldbroatch.users.btopenworld.com/za2.jpg
If you install a firewall which doesn’t automatically disable Windows firewall, the normal advice is to disable it yourself. In XP SP2 this is done from the security centre. In pre SP2 XP, the firewall is found here:
Hi malware fighters,
In a sense part of the discussion is true, not the part that you can do without outbound protection, but the assumption that a firewall offers the same sort of protection it did a couple of years ago. In that respect and only in that respect MasterTech has a point, but in a different way as he presents it.
There is a lot of things just passing beyond your firewall’s radar, because it was not designed to block this, Whereas a good firewall protected against the majority of attacks a couple of years ago, to-day a large part of attacks circumvents the firewall or passes right through it. Content scanning of port 80 protects against
the majority of these kind of attacks. A good firewall could once ward off 95%
of all attacks , now a good 30% of malware vectors use a different way to infect.
Port 80, the main carrier port of all webtraffick is notorious in this
respect. Via the webmail interface an attack on the internal mail server
can be achieved. Inside a mail a weblink can be sent, where a click-through
can lead to a lot of trouble.
A good firewall is a must, but actually we have gone back to day 0 again to the days before firewalls were available.
Today whereas all sort of applications have a web interface for the future all sort of distributed applications based on web services will use port 80. (Now you know why you have the avast webshield installed inside your browser). Even p2p-ing programs that are not supported by firewall proxies have a fall-back option for the web protocol.
Craig Hicks-Frazer, Managing Director van Blue Coat, measures that 50 to 70%
of all the traffic for his clients runs via port 80, and that percentage is only growing.
Checking web traffic for dangerous and undesired content is more difficult
than scanning in-coming mail. Simple in-line scanning, where webcontent is
being examined directly, does not offer a good solution. It means that the user
sits waiting for the next screen all the time. Using content scanning on demand
(DrWeb’s hyperlink scanning) is better. But when things fail, one even could
get a time-out of the application. It is also difficult to apply on a larger
scale in a commercial surroundings.
Caching appears to be the solution to these problems.
By saving all of the webcache (for all of the firm) and loading this even pro-actively, the scanner can perform on an acceptable scale. Even better so the web-cache can enhance performance as a whole and lower the bandwidth used.
First the cache is checked before new content is brought in, if that takes a
while the user is served up with “patience-page”. According to Hicks-Frazer
this was the reason that user started clicking again and again, while the
background system was busy scanning so it almost collapsed under the
enormous load.
That is why Blue Coat as a vendor of web cache and proxy systems applications is
now heavily into web content scanning. Their port 80 Security Appliances
do mainly consist of a web cache together with a security engine, that looks
after the implementation of set policies for URL and MIME type filtering, virus
scanning and bandwidth management.
Scanning and filtering is done via the Internet Content Adaptation Protocol
(ICAP) intertwined with content scanners. Supported here are applications like
WebWasher, Finjan SurfinGate, SmartFilter van Secure Computing, Websense,
Symantec CarrierScan Server en TrendMicro InterScan Server.
Setting policies for port 80 scanners is like setting management interfaces of
firewall systems. It looks lite setting the rules for let us say Check Point
VPN-1/FireWall-1.
The protocols can be set for a user or for a group of users, the same as what
content can be approached, what content can be viewed and at what moment this
is allowed. So you can filter out abusive language, religious or fundamentalist
content, pr0n, but also sports and private stock, what could be allowed during
lunch hour could be a subject of debate. Then you could be free to do your
shopping, download your e-books etc. etc. So people would not linger on e-Bay.
For this reasonm time-outs and content limits could be implimented.
From a security point of view filtering outgoing content is much more interesting.
Sop instant messaging may be allowed on the firms Intranet but not on the
Internet. Sometimes only file-sharing is blocked, usb sharing is blocked,
and outgoing content is checked for certain terms to secure certain
documents or information to be leaked.
For the users everything should be as transparent as possible, first you get
a policy survey inside the browser, you have to agree with that before you
can go on the Internet. If you are in confict with the policy you will get
a pop-up. Easiest is to block this, but better to use a form of social
engineering seeing to it that applications of this sort are being counted,
and no-one want to be “top of the list”. This works, the same as “all your
attempts are going to be logged”. The management has to be shown only
general surveys, because full reports would take too much of their time.
How you implement these policies as a home-user is interesting to know,
I think a form of hips and layered protection with in-browser security will grant you a way of securing your machine.
polonus
The fact is everyone should use a Firewall and the XP SP2 Firewall is more than sufficient for the average user.
I guess it’s a case of ‘do as I say’ not ‘do as I do’ as Mastertech is a Zone Alarm user: