You all know that polonus is also active in the virus and worms, and he does the occasional hijackthis analysis and system task scan result evaluation, and there is a new trend lately. For the greater part of the HJT logfiles with malware found either the victim does not have the latest service pack installed or even a larger amount of victims have NO ACTIVE SOFTWARE FIREWALL running.
The one-sided Microsoft Firewall is not fully protecting them. It is beyond me where this trend to go onto the Internet without Firewall protection stems from, but it is obvious that especially hordes of Americans do not use any firewall anymore to-day. The attackers have a much easier job that way, please guys and girls get protection, install a good firewall. Wish the Avast Firewall was already launched!
me being an American it come from a lazy point of view is what I would call it, the people I know that have this mentality don’t care that much about computer security as long as the the machine there working on gets them on the internet and allows then to do whatever they want without worry. A example is a friend of mine’s mom loves to play games on Pogo.com but she cant play with a firewall active so she 100% of the time has no firewall active whatsoever and always questions me where all of her infections are coming from during internet browsing this is just my opinion of course.
There are many freeware firewalls such as, Comodo, PCTools Firewall Plus, Jetico, etc. - Zone Alarm free works fine with avast and has a reasonably friendly user interface, however, the free version is becoming bloated with trial ware and is also crippled as far as outbound protection goes In the Program Control, configuration area, the slider will only goes as far as Medium protection, if you want more you have to buy the Pro version.