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[personal profile] fleetfootmike
Installed [livejournal.com profile] stevieannie's ADSL for them yesterday, having refused to let them plug it in till I'd set up the firewall on the router.

Within twenty minutes of putting it online, the firewall bounced its first attempted winnuke, and it's currently rejecting various probes about one every ten minutes, and has been ever since it started. And will no doubt continue to do so.

Lets be careful out there, folks. GET a firewall, be it XP's, OS X's or a software one like Zone Alarm. Use it.

(no subject)

Date: 2005-01-19 08:25 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] rinioth.livejournal.com
Very good advice. These days even people using Dial-up access need a firewall.

Note: ZoneAlarm is free for personal use and it's not too big a download even on dial-up.

(no subject)

Date: 2005-01-19 09:09 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] redaxe.livejournal.com
Yep. Studies show that even with (especially with?) broadband, a machine will be compromised before adequate OS patches can be downloaded.

I use ZoneAlarm but plan to switch to a hardware one when I get some networking installed here. (I also have the McAfee firewall, set up on the new laptop, but even though the laptop is netready, I haven't got routing in for it yet, so haven't had a chance to compare.)

(no subject)

Date: 2005-01-19 04:18 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] armb.livejournal.com
Been there, done that. Installed XP, installed Zone Alarm (or Kerio - I forget which way I swapped when), connected to net (admittedly only with modem), caught MSBlast while downloading patch, reformatted, went into work with Zip disk and downloaded patches to apply to fresh install.

(no subject)

Date: 2005-01-19 10:12 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] hawkida.livejournal.com
Twenty minutes? Try TWO minutes or less...

My mother's machine was riddled with spyware and crud so I set about fixing it and accidentally deleted something important and killed XP. Then I couldn't install over the top of the old version, it would get so far then say something about no OS and send me back to the start of the process.

I put a new drive in, demoting the main one to to slave, and did a fresh XP install. Meanwhile she'd got the modem and software to install broadband. Since all I had was the XP disk and I couldn't remember how to turn on the XP firewall the first thing I planned to do was d/l ZoneAlarm. I logged on, the BT broadband stuff updated itself, I went to the ZoneAlarm site and the computer decided to shut down. Bloody thing had been infected with something - sasser worm, I think, but without me even doing anything! It gave a 60 second warning and shut down the computer every time it connected to the internet. It was fine if not connected, but how was I meant to get a firewall up when there wasn't time to download it? Would the XP one work? If so where was it? (It was about midnight after a long day and it never stuck me to use MS Help at the time). I considered dialling up, downloading the firewall software on my laptop and finding some way to transfer it across, possibly using my phone's SD card in my SD card reader between the 2 machines. Then inspiration struck. I searched the second hard drive and found SpyBot which I'd previously downloaded and broken things with. I ran it, killed the worm, and found I'd got a download of ZoneAlarm in there, too, so I installed it from the local version.

Connected back up again and all was well.

But it was less than two minutes of access by broadband, possibly less than one, when the damn thing hit the machine.

People NEED firewalls now.

Steve Dix

Date: 2005-01-19 10:33 am (UTC)
From: (Anonymous)
Personally, I'd go for Sygate personal firewall over Zonealarm. It's free too.

http://www.sygate.com/

Sygate also have a firewall test on their website, which is VERY useful for seeing exactly what can get in and what can't.

http://scan.sygatetech.com/

(no subject)

Date: 2005-01-19 05:00 pm (UTC)
ext_15802: (Default)
From: [identity profile] megamole.livejournal.com
Yup - I'd echo these sentiments re SPF's increased friendliness and reduced levels of OS intrusion.

(no subject)

Date: 2005-01-19 11:12 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] keristor.livejournal.com
I have a hardware one, but because I connect from Win2k to work via a VPN I also have ZoneAlarm. And some virus thing with three letters (AVG or something like that? It's free for personal use) which has never found anything unpleasant on my machine (it doesn't think Windoze is unpleasant *g*)...

(no subject)

Date: 2005-01-19 11:38 am (UTC)
From: (Anonymous)
Hey Mike, have you seen this?

http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/technology/2004-11-29-honeypot_x.htm

It is indeed *very* worrying.

Dominic (dlm)

(no subject)

Date: 2005-01-19 03:06 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] antonia-tiger.livejournal.com
ZoneAlarm has the useful feature that it tells you if something new is trying to access the network from your machine, even the LAN if you set it up that way. Unfortunatrly too much stuff knows how to switch it off unnoticed.

(no subject)

Date: 2005-01-19 03:50 pm (UTC)
hrrunka: Attentive icon by Narumi (sparks)
From: [personal profile] hrrunka
ISC's survival time graph seems to be showing an increase in projected survival of a newly-installed PC at the moment, though the error bars are a mite bigger than they've been for a while too. Not that it makes a lot of difference whether an un-patched PC survives 15 or 25 minutes; it's still not long enough to find all the necessary patches, let alone download them.... :/

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