I am using Sygate Personal Firewall, which was bought by Norton in 2005. It's good, but it pops up a message every time I start up, and I can't register the program, since it is no longer supported. Can you suggest another good free firewall?
Good free firewall?
Miscellaneous Forums/General Discussion/Good free firewall? oops sorry i thought you said virus, me not woke up yet
I think in the UK that ZoneAlarm is the default free one that most people goes for. It's always on magazine coverdisks.
Zone Alarm does my man boobs in. I use SPF too, and the warning message does indeed annoy. You used to be able to disable the register message in start up. But the version i downloaded a couple of years back, doesn't seem to do that...
Same, using an old SPF install and once I clicked 'register online' it went to a 404 page, but it hasn't bothered me since then.
I been told that you should only go for a hardware firewall.
Those software based ones is not secure enough.
Those software based ones is not secure enough.
I been told that you should only go for a hardware firewall.
Speaking as a security professional, I consider them both an important layer of defense.
A hardware firewall is great for on your network (business or personal) in that it can protect everything that sits behind it from everything in front of it (and vice versa). However, with today's mobile workforce, laptops are common. Since laptops won't always be behind your hardware firewall, and it's not practical to carry around a CheckPoint or PIX hardware appliance everywhere you go, a software-based one on the laptop is a necessity.
Personally, if I had to use a Windows laptop and go with a free firewall, I'd probably grab ZoneAlarm. If I didn't mind spending $80, and wasn't planning on serious gaming on that laptop, I'd consider something like the Norton 360 product that does a bunch of things like AV, firewall, spyware detection, etc.
I been told that you should only go for a hardware firewall.
By whom? A person who sells hardware firewalls?NetFilter/iptables is every bit as good as any "hardware" firewall, and better than most.
Those software based ones is not secure enough.
Secure enough for what? Keeping terrorist plots from the NSA? No. Preventing some script kiddie from crashing your box? Yes. I been told that you should only go for a hardware firewall.
While hardware one is best at keeping stuff out (& in, if correctly configured) and creates a safe 'bubble' for your lan, a software one is more dynamic (but are less secure as they rely on healthy background processes on your pc, vunrable to crashes or attacks)
I tend to use both, my hardware one to keep "them" out, and my software ones to keep "it" in.
(on mine theres a bit more to it than that but thats basically it)
What's wrong with windows firewall? It's pretty reliable ...
The Windows Firewall doesn't filter or monitor outbound traffic. In addition, it's very easy to shut off via malicious code. That said, it's better than nothing.
The Windows Firewall doesn't filter or monitor outbound traffic.
Really? o_O What use is that?! Mind you, I know exactly why MS have done that: they don't want all their crap phoning home at will. :/ It's good, but it pops up a message every time I start up, and I can't register the program, since it is no longer supported.
I replied to this prior to the server switch, but it got lost, just fill out the form as normal and then close the browser window, it never prompts again.
I been told that you should only go for a hardware firewall.
A hardware firewall is better at protecting your network as a whole from threats from the outside -- however, it will do absolutely nothing to prevent anything nasty from getting *out* of your computer.
A firewall (hardware or software) will do nothing to protect your computer from threats over 'authorized' ports -- meansing that someone can email you a trojan horse, virus, or whatever. You can also get infected from a CD, etc.
Now, imagine this trojan horse getting exectured on your PC. Imagine it searching your HD and sending all kinds of important files to its creators computer somewhere.
A hardware firewall will only see outgoing traffic from a trusted source (your computer) and let it all out without a blip. A software firewall will see attempted outgoing traffic originating in a program (the virus) that hasn't been authorized to send before, so will either flat-out block it, or ask for permission first.
For the *best* results you need *both* hardware and software firewall.
A hardware firewall will only see outgoing traffic from a trusted source (your computer) and let it all out without a blip.
That's not entirely true. A hardware firewall, properly configured, will see if your computer starts trying to send traffic out on an unauthorized port or to an unauthorized IP address. It's called egress filtering, and it should be used more than it is. Some firewalls, Application Proxy Firewalls in particular, can even tell if you are sending malformed packets on an authorized port/protocol.
That part that is true is that a hardware firewall won't be able to tell if it is Internet Explorer or some piece of spyware on your computer that's doing the communicating, if it's sending its info over a valid port/protocol, to an authorized destination, using valid packets.
I use comodo personal firewall http://www.personalfirewall.comodo.com/
Kerio killed me system (had to do a windows reinstall) sygate was a good one too
Kerio killed me system (had to do a windows reinstall) sygate was a good one too
Some firewalls, Application Proxy Firewalls in particular, can even tell if you are sending malformed packets on an authorized port/protocol.
Execpt that the majority of programs pick a semi-random outgoing port on the local machine to talk to a fixed port on the remote machine. A single FTP session can end up using a different outgoing port for each file it transfers (got to love the ability to upload more than one file at a time) using thousands of different ports in the process.
A hardware firewall has no knowledge of what happens at the application level, just that it sees FTP traffic going out. It doesn't know if it was send by ftp.exe or spyware.exe, and will do next-to-nothing to protect you once you're infected.
(Other than that it can prevent the malicious external machine from communicating to the virus and giving it instructions -- but if the virus has a predetermined to-do list, the hardware firewall won't stop it once it's active)
Execpt that the majority of programs pick a semi-random outgoing port on the local machine to talk to a fixed port on the remote machine. A single FTP session can end up using a different outgoing port for each file it transfers (got to love the ability to upload more than one file at a time) using thousands of different ports in the process.
A hardware firewall has no knowledge of what happens at the application level, just that it sees FTP traffic going out. It doesn't know if it was send by ftp.exe or spyware.exe, and will do next-to-nothing to protect you once you're infected.
(Other than that it can prevent the malicious external machine from communicating to the virus and giving it instructions -- but if the virus has a predetermined to-do list, the hardware firewall won't stop it once it's active)
A hardware firewall has no knowledge of what happens at the application level, just that it sees FTP traffic going out. It doesn't know if it was send by ftp.exe or spyware.exe, and will do next-to-nothing to protect you once you're infected.
(Other than that it can prevent the malicious external machine from communicating to the virus and giving it instructions -- but if the virus has a predetermined to-do list, the hardware firewall won't stop it once it's active)
I know all that. But a proxy firewall doesn't care about the port number, unless you tell it to. It proxies at the application layer of the OSI model, so it knows it is FTP traffic even if you stick it on port 80, or port 65535.
On the other hand, if you stick your FTP traffic on port 80, a stateful packet firewall will only look at it and say, "oh, that's going to port 80, and port 80 is allowed" even though you're trying to block FTP.
As for your second paragraph, I addressed that above when I said "That part that is true is that a hardware firewall won't be able to tell if it is Internet Explorer or some piece of spyware on your computer that's doing the communicating, if it's sending its info over a valid port/protocol, to an authorized destination, using valid packets."
I used to manage and configure both types of hardware firewalls (and some software firewalls) for one of the largest companies in the world, so unfortunately, I know their strengths and weaknesses more than I care to.