best software firewall?

[B. Nice]

<snip>

I agree with you Ken Blake and Zone Alarm Professional guards my
dual-boot 98SE/XP PRO. and has not failed me yet.

How can you be sure about that?

I remember putting Windows Firewall through the test and it failed

How did it fail? - What did you test?

even without allowing any exceptions but Zone Alarm Professional
has not failed me yet. A good site to test your firewall is grc.com through the Shields Up and
scan all service ports which is over 1000. If you get a pass with a
full stealth rating then your firewall is pretty well protected.

Aha.

 

[B. Nice]

ZoneAlarm free edition works great.

In what respect?

 

[B. Nice]

why don´t you just disable all services you don´t need? Does not
cost a dime, does not load your PC with new vulnerabilities... And no,
something is not necessarily better than nothing.

Agreed.

 

[Sebastian Gottschalk]

A good site to test your firewall is grc.com through the Shields Up

It's about the worst ever. Sometimes obviously inconsistent results, bad
testing methods, useless reporting, utterly wrong description, and the
creator is a known k00k.

and scan all service ports which is over 1000.

Huh? General services are < 1024.

If you get a pass with a full stealth rating then your firewall is
pretty well protected.

I'd rather consider it misconfigured then.

 

[Dan]

<snip>

I had users see if they could break through the Windows Firewall and
they were able to break through it. The Windows Firewall is definitely
overrated.

 

[Pennywise]

On Fri, 18 Aug 2006 11:38:51 -0700, (e-mail address removed) wrote:

Outpost is a piece of software that is so badly designed, that it
allows a restricted user to easily gain administrative rights.
http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/19024/info

This error is by design and has been there for years without Agnitum
caring to fix it.
http://www.securitytracker.com/alerts/2004/Jan/1008755.html

Sorry, but that is not a company to be trusted in terms of security. A
good look-and-feel does'nt make up for a bad engine.

I download'd the free version, (real email address is required) now
I'm being spam'd by them...

"NOTE: This is a limited-time! You have to purchase Outpost Firewall
Pro within 48 hours of receiving this message to qualify for this
special price. This offer will not be repeated."

I'll not install it now, sticking to ZA

 

[Sebastian Gottschalk]

the XP firewall made some exception rule for this program by itself
to let this program communicate on the network.

Yeah. If you don't want to that, configure it accordingly.

How it knew what to do was beyond me.

Oh, quite simple. It has access to the TDI stack information, therefore
is able to allow passive listen()ing ports. The rest is usually
addressed by SPI.

Those policy rules were stopping the program from communicating, which I
didn't have time to find out what rules needed to be made to allow the
program to communicate.

Huh? Where's the argument?

Those policy rules also didn't allow me to disable
the XP FW in the normal manner of disabling it by going to the NIC's
property page via the O/S to disable it.

Yeah, that's the point of Group Policies. Anyway, it's stupid, as a
local Administrator could always circumvent them.

However, I used regedit and sat a registry entry for the XP FW to disable
it. I was told about this by Tech Support. Once I did that and re-booted the
machine, the XP FW was down.

I don't understand why MS has made this so easy to do.

You should put the "easy" in IRONY tags. Anyway, why didn't you use the
Group Policy Object Editor?

 

[Duane Arnold]

Yeah. If you don't want to that, configure it accordingly.


Oh, quite simple. It has access to the TDI stack information, therefore
is able to allow passive listen()ing ports. The rest is usually
addressed by SPI.

What I think is really happening is somehow the .NET Framework has something
to do with this, because this .NET solution with several projects was
compiled and executed within the .NET IDE.

The .NET machine configuration is looking at this application as a trusted
application, for the exe. The remote server portion of this application was
complied to a DLL and I don't think an exception rule was made for it in the
XP FW for it, even though this entire .NET Remoting application was running
on my development machine. The remote server could not be contacted for
whatever reasons.

Huh? Where's the argument?

The argument there is it interfered with my development and debugging
process with this .NET solution on my own development machine, which until
this point, no developer even knows how to develop a .NET Remoting
application and no one realizes that this is a problem.

Yeah, that's the point of Group Policies. Anyway, it's stupid, as a
local Administrator could always circumvent them.

Well, I did what the tech support people indicated to do, which was disabled
the XP FW and whatever else was in the way of me running and debugging the
application in the .NET IDE.

You should put the "easy" in IRONY tags. Anyway, why didn't you use the
Group Policy Object Editor?

If they had told me and gave info on what I needed to do, I would have used
that too.

Anyway, the XP FW is out of the way and I am happy.

Duane

 

[Dan]

<snip>

Have fun if someone hacks through your computer if it is not well protected.

 

[Phisherman]

<snip>

Have fun if someone hacks through your computer if it is not well protected.

Even with the best firewall a system can be broken into. I used an
old PC to load Linux, Squid proxy, and Jay's firewall (all free) which
means the hacker better know some Linux and Windows. Just don't
bother to backup files you don't mind losing.

 

[Dan]

Even with the best firewall a system can be broken into. I used an
old PC to load Linux, Squid proxy, and Jay's firewall (all free) which
means the hacker better know some Linux and Windows. Just don't
bother to backup files you don't mind losing.

I agree that it is important to have a backup of the files that you
don't want to lose.

 

[Sebastian Gottschalk]

What I think is really happening is somehow the .NET Framework has something
to do with this, because this .NET solution with several projects was
compiled and executed within the .NET IDE.

The .NET machine configuration is looking at this application as a trusted
application, for the exe. The remote server portion of this application was
complied to a DLL and I don't think an exception rule was made for it in the
XP FW for it, even though this entire .NET Remoting application was running
on my development machine.

That would be news. The .NET runtime isn't documented to do such a thing.

The argument there is it interfered with my development and debugging
process with this .NET solution on my own development machine, which until
this point, no developer even knows how to develop a .NET Remoting
application and no one realizes that this is a problem.

Documenting the used ports is the job of the programmer, reading the
documentation and allowing those ports is the job of the administrator.

However, a program might assist by using both the IPHelper API to open
the port at XP ICFW and UPnP to do so remotely with UPnP-capable
devices. And a good administrator should disable such functionality.

 

[Sebastian Gottschalk]

<snip>

Have fun if someone hacks through your computer if it is not well
protected.

At the point was that ShieldsUp doesn't help you with protection. If you
want to audit a packet filter, use some serious port scans like
<http://linux-sec.net/Audit/nmap.test.gwif.html>.

Anyway, one usually doesn't need any packet filter for protection.

Beside that, ZoneAlarm doesn't offer any protection either.

 

[Duane Arnold]

Duane Arnold wrote:




That would be news. The .NET runtime isn't documented to do such a thing.

Well, of course it's news to you as you were not trained on the ins and
outs of .NET like I was for 8 hours a day for 4 weeks by a .NET guru
out of Indian the company flew to do the training. You have not taken
any certifications about .NET. You're ignorant and you only know about
..NET based on some articles you read about .NET and I know it.

Documenting the used ports is the job of the programmer, reading the
documentation and allowing those ports is the job of the administrator.

Look man, I downloaded that program to see how it works. It happened to
have .NET Remoting in it. I am in the process of ripping that program
apart to be used as a training program to show the ins and outs of how
to do OOP's programming with this in-house Object Server Framework that
uses DDD concepts instead of using MS-TSLA concepts in developing
Enterprise N-tier solutions for the company based on what the Director
of IT wants to move towards, which I know you know nothing about the
concepts.

I got to get this done like yesterday to even develop this Underwriting
solution the company is banking on to pull in business with this
Enterprise solution, along with pulling the rest of the programming
teams along with me in the training.

I don't have time to be fu*king around with that damn program, just drop
that damn XP FW packet filter and get it the Hell out of my way, so I
can see what it's doing so that I can re-write using Object Server.

However, a program might assist by using both the IPHelper API to open
the port at XP ICFW and UPnP to do so remotely with UPnP-capable
devices. And a good administrator should disable such functionality.

Do you really want me to tell you how much I care about this?

Duane

 

[Sebastian Gottschalk]

Well, of course it's news to you as you were not trained on the ins and
outs of .NET like I was for 8 hours a day for 4 weeks by a .NET guru
out of Indian the company flew to do the training. You have not taken
any certifications about .NET. You're ignorant and you only know about
.NET based on some articles you read about .NET and I know it.

You should write it all BIG, this should help supporting your yelling.
Well, next time I hope you've got some arguments.

Look man, I downloaded that program to see how it works. It happened to
have .NET Remoting in it. I am in the process of ripping that program
apart to be used as a training program to show the ins and outs of how
to do OOP's programming with this in-house Object Server Framework that
uses DDD concepts instead of using MS-TSLA concepts in developing
Enterprise N-tier solutions for the company based on what the Director
of IT wants to move towards, which I know you know nothing about the
concepts.

And this is a scenario clearly beyond a simple non-enterprise-level
client-server application, and also beyond XP ICFW.

I don't have time to be fu*king around with that damn program, just drop
that damn XP FW packet filter and get it the Hell out of my way, so I
can see what it's doing so that I can re-write using Object Server.

Which is what you've done. You asked the support to make an exemption
for you, and you've got it. Well, where's the relation to the topic?

Do you really want me to tell you how much I care about this?

You should - after all, you brought it up initially.

 

[Duane Arnold]

Duane Arnold wrote:




You should write it all BIG, this should help supporting your yelling.
Well, next time I hope you've got some arguments.

It was not about any arguments you moron. When are you going to get this
through your *thick* skull.

And this is a scenario clearly beyond a simple non-enterprise-level
client-server application, and also beyond XP ICFW.

I know.

Which is what you've done. You asked the support to make an exemption
for you, and you've got it. Well, where's the relation to the topic?

I am talking about my needs in the first place and you in your *blabber
mouth wisdom* decided that you needed to run your mouth. As a matter of
fact, I was not even posting to you about this in the first place now
was I. And yet, here you are blabbering about the mouth as usual with
*you* as usual running up and down the threads running your mouth.

You should - after all, you brought it up initially.

And I was not even posting to you, but here you are as usual with your
*dick* in your hand.

Duane

 

[Sebastian Gottschalk]

And I was not even posting to you,

No, you were posting to this group. Hint: This is Usenet.

but here you are as usual with your *dick* in your hand.

It was YOU who was complaining about some very non-typical problem with
XP-ICFW that is absolutely not related to the topic at all. No do you
have something to discuss at all or do you just want to spam us with
your absolutely uninteresting complaints?

 

[Duane Arnold]

The bottom line here is that you don't own or control anything on this
Internet.

Did you think your little troll like maneuver was going to stop me from
replying.

You're a snake in the grass and a POS is what you are.

I don't want the *Big Blabber Mouth the Expert* to think I missed this
by not posting back to *general*.

Duane

 

[Dan]

Beside that, ZoneAlarm doesn't offer any protection either.

You are entitled to your opinion but ZoneAlarm does a great job as a
firewall.