XP Firewall.Am i really safe?

  • Thread starter Thread starter stuart
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stuart

How good is windows xp firewall compared to others?. As i
have always had my firewall up and use a free antivirus
which gets updated weekly.I was just wondering if the
person or people that are making this attack on microsoft
have found a way around the firewall.And with the recent
attack with msblast although i never got it.Would i be
better off with another firewall.
Am i really safe?.
 
It depends on what you believe you need protection *from*.

The XP firewall is intended to protect you from active attacks by other
sites: worms, hacker exploits, or bad network traffic. In this respect,
most personal firewalls are pretty much the same, and the XP firewall is
certainly good enough for the vast majority of users. FYI: from what I can
tell, nobody with XP Firewall enabled caught BLASTER.

I'm sure there are more feature-rich firewalls out there... what you want to
ask yourself, though, is what you need to be protected against. If your
primary concerns are viruses, worms, and network-based hacker attacks, XPFW
plus good antivirus software is probably enough.

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Greetings --

WinXP's built-in firewall is fine at stopping incoming attacks, and
hiding all of your ports from probes. It doesn't give you any alarms
to tell you that it is working, though. What WinXP also does not do,
is protect you from any Trojans or spyware that you might download and
install inadvertently. It doesn't monitor out-going traffic at all,
much less block (or at least ask you about) the bad or the
questionable out-going packets.

ZoneAlarm, Kerio, or Sygate are much better, and there are a free
versions available. Personally, I've been very happy with Symantec's
Norton Internet Security 2002 (NIS 2004 is now available), which
includes Norton AntiVirus, Norton Personal Firewall, parental
controls, privacy controls, and ad blocking. (Just the elimination of
many of the pop-up ads on the Internet made the price worth-while to
me.)


Bruce Chambers

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