It's a jungle out there

[fleetfootmike]

Installed 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.

Comments

[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.)

[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.