How Secure is Windows Firewall? 620
Garret writes "Though Microsoft is doing their part in protecting Windows users from internet attacks by including a firewall in their latest service pack, one has to wonder just how secure is the Windows Firewall from XP Service Pack 2? Not too good according to Flexbeta. Their recommendation is to turn off Windows Firewall and get an alternative such as ZoneAlarm or Sygate PF. Simply the fact that Windows Firewall can be turned off by another application is enough to tell me Microsoft has goofed again." PCWorld also has a story about the new firewall capability.
Zone Alarm? Blech (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Zone Alarm? Blech (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Zone Alarm? Blech (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Zone Alarm? Blech (Score:3, Informative)
Normally, with ZA, I require my browser to ask permission to access the web - this happens on the browser launch. With KPF, I was asked on visiting *every* goddamned website. It was either that or allow my browser access *all* the time. Insane.
I fixed my issue with ZA and am back using it. It's much less annoying and unobtrusive than KPF.
Re:Zone Alarm? Blech (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Zone Alarm? Blech (Score:5, Informative)
After an 'Ask Slashdot' a while back asking for the first apps you put on a Windows system.. I had ZoneAlarm in there, until someone suggested that I try Kerio. I've been a Kerio user ever since. The only issue I've found is that if you have a load of connections and the Low Rated intrusions are written to the log file, the GUI will slow right down and crash.
The best thing about Kerio is the ability to keep track of rogue componants trying to activate other componants and other programs, whereas that was only available in ZA Pro. I also love the Ad Blocking/filtering. I recently installed ZA for someone who'd just got DSL, and noticed a big overhaul in options from the previous version. But I never really looked into what ZoneLabs have done with it because I'm a happy Kerio user. ZoneAlarm is good enough for Joe User (after doing some initial setup first).
Mind, I installed SP2... and it doesn't have Kerio on it's 3rd party firewall list, so it'll activate its own (which promptly got disabled by moi).
Re:Zone Alarm? Blech (Score:4, Interesting)
Anyway I've been looking through suggestions in these comments to see what comes up most often and trying it out. I have used Kerio before but didn't really like it but I might give Sygate Personal Firewall a go. I don't give much of a crap about privacy features in firewalls anymore as Mozilla basically does most of what I require privacy wise.
Re:Zone Alarm? Blech (Score:5, Insightful)
When will people learn that the contents of your computer may be irrelevant to many viruses and hacks? If the goal of the virus writer is to hijack your machine in order to use it as a spam relay or zombie, you don't have to have anything interesting on your computer at all...the virus will conveniently come with its own interesting stuff to install on your machine!
Re:Zone Alarm? Blech (Score:3, Insightful)
When the guys in dark sunglasses and earpeices break down your door because your computer was involved in a break-in to a government computer, you'll wish you had that firewall, gunky or not.
Re:Zone Alarm? Blech (Score:5, Informative)
It's great because it detects any program that tries to connect to the internet from your PC, and pops up a window asking you if you want to allow the program to connect, or to block it, and if you want to set up a rule for future attempts. It also detects connection attempts from the outside, and asks you about those too. Best windows security tool I've seen.
Re:Zone Alarm? Blech (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Zone Alarm? Blech (Score:5, Funny)
The main technique microsoft is using is that they made a shitty firewall so it would get mentioned in the IT topic section of slashdot. They knew all of the would be hackers would read it, and have their eyes burned out by the hidious brighter than the sun sand brown color scheme. How clever Bill, how clever.
Well... (Score:3, Insightful)
I didn't use v4 for long before I went back to v2, but I've switched to Syga
Re:Zone Alarm? Blech (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Zone Alarm? Blech (Score:3, Interesting)
Microsoft has shown very often that it is king of good enough. Microsoft does not strive to be the best, just good enough to stop the majority of people from searching out and installing alternatives. Microsoft does not strive to satisfy the average /. reader.
Stealth? *ARGGGH* (Score:5, Insightful)
It's annoying on two levels, firstly it breaks the requirements of the rfc's leaving other nodes on the network hanging waiting to see of a connection is going to succeed or be rejected, waiting for timeouts isnt fun. secondly, THERE IS ABSOLUTELY NO POINT, it is trivial to find out if there is a node at that address, all sufficiently intelligent scanners can tell if there is a machine there, nmap for example. YES WINDOWS USERS, I'M TALKING TO YOU, get rid of that stealth crap, if there is no machine there the nearest router will return no such host...if there's no icmp from the router, we know that there's a windows user there (of course, we cant determine the operating system of the node, but everyone knows only windows users do this)...
It's pointless, it's only used because having a "stealth" computer sounds cool on proprietory firewall marketing material (would it be so desirable if it were called "filtered"), please turn it off...
Three letters (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Three letters (Score:5, Informative)
My roommate's computer, which is installed pretty much the same as my own, minus SP2, is reporting all kinds of information - computer name, workgroup, and a ton of open ports - to the ShieldsUp scanner.
I just thought I'd mention that, since the only thing I have installed that could be closing these ports and fixing things up is SP2 and the Firewall.
--Dan
Re:Three letters (Score:3, Informative)
I also note that a lot of M$ programs seem to want to connect somewhere or other, Bill's firewall w
Re:Stealth? *ARGGGH* (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Stealth? *ARGGGH* (Score:3, Insightful)
Security by obscurity is a bad practice to pass on.
Re:Stealth? *ARGGGH* (Score:5, Insightful)
Have you ever heard of people buying those little 'This house protected by...' stickers for their homes when they really have no alarm system. Its called a deterrent, it doesn't protect from the determined, experienced individual, but it makes the casual thief think twice and look for another target. Silently dropping ICMP packets does the same thing, a lot of script kiddies have no idea how things work so if they get no response from an address, they just move on making it one less headache to deal with. Unless your the type of person who loves analyzing logs and your not hosting services through your firewall, there is nothing wrong with it and it is a valid response to dealing with idiots.
Re:Stealth? *ARGGGH* (Score:3, Insightful)
pf does not just drop ping packets, it can drop any connection that was not statefully initiated from the trusted side.
Security by obscurity is a bad practice to pass on.
pf dropping packets that it does not expect to get, by no means falls under the typic
Re:Stealth? *ARGGGH* (Score:5, Informative)
I have worked for military, top tier financial and law enforcement entities (I am not the AC poster, BTW). In the military, no matter how high your security clearance is, if you don't "need to know" something to carry out the job at hand, then you will not get to know it. If you do need to know it and have a high enough clearance, then you will get to know it. That is a security through obscurity policy that helps to make a nation safer.
If a military satelite communications system uses some hypothetically perfect authentication and encryption, then would there be any good reason to publish to the World the specifications of the control codes? No, there would be no good reason, so it should not be made public, regardless of the fact that the crypto is supposed to be perfect. "More eyes looking at the code" would not be good enough in this instance.
Obscurity techniques that lead to higher security, does get used and should get used. Because they usually add a layer of security.
The problem here, is that YOU, along with a lot of others around here, think of "security through obscurity" in the same weak light.
Security through weak obscurity is bad. Relying on it, is unforgivable.
As I said in another post, passwords and encryption are obscurity methods that can be strong.
Re:Stealth? *ARGGGH* (Score:3, Insightful)
There is nothing wrong with security through obscurity unless that's all you have.
As best I can tell, your post states that promoting security through obscurity is a bad thing because it gives people the impression that obscurity is all they need.
The problem with that is AC explicitly says that you need more than security through obscurity. If people can read that and come away with the impression that security through obscurity is all that they n
Re:Stealth? *ARGGGH* (Score:3, Insightful)
When this is applied to a firewall protecting a network of machines, then it's even more useful as you cannot be certain what is there and what isn't.
I don't care
Re:Stealth? *ARGGGH* (Score:5, Insightful)
What about net or port unreachables? You block all those then you end up making the users wait extra before their _insert client here_ built-in timeout occurs. Same with host unknowns. It also creates a pain to the netops whom need to run diagnostics.
There are some ICMPs which have little or no place in most networks and are OK to block for the most part.
And lets not even get into PMTU issues. (do not frag/frag needed), especially with microsofts brain-dead implementation of PMTU in short order.
And blocking destination-unreachable, source-quench, time-exceeded, parameter-problem, can realy make a networks response times to these conditions suck ass.
Again pushing security through obscurity is a BAD idea, whether used alone or in conjunction with other security measures. If a windows users thinks his machine is invincible (i am not saying _you_ do) than they will be less likely to further secure his or her machine. Good habits form good conditions. Blocking all icmps is BAD practice.
There are hundred of papers on this and none but the most pedestrian sites (i.e. marketers to the windows user) advocate blocking ALL ICMPs.
You fell for pure marketing and ignore real-world network operations.
Re:Stealth? *ARGGGH* (Score:4, Interesting)
As to netops, again, we're not talking core net routers. We're talking leaf nodes, and I'd note that the networks generally diagnose through the physical layer (talking to the cable/DSL modem) and not through the computer.
For *users*, this is actually a valid thing to do. Its basically a tarpit trap - anything that makes an attacker's mass attacks slow down can't really be viewed as bad if it doesn't interfere with the majority of legit uses.
Re:Stealth? *ARGGGH* (Score:3)
Aren't most portscanning tools multithreaded anyway? I doubt there are any tools which are both effective and single-threaded. A tool that opens 50,000 TCP ports simultaniously would not suffer very much at all by waiting for 2 minutes or whatever the TCP SYN/ACK timeout is.
There is the issue of TCP RST or "ICMP unreachable" fingerprinting - it's conceivable that an attacker would use your NAK to narrow down the possibilities of what OS you are using. (TTL, for example) But assuming that this is a host
Re:Stealth? *ARGGGH* (Score:3, Funny)
Because STEALTH is how you security your compooter!! Bill Gates is the smartest man on earth and he is smarter than those evil H4CK0RZ who are trying to break is pretty WIND0WZ!! I think GRC is the best web site ever made and if it says "Stealth" then that means I have securitieied my compooter! Stoopid Lunix doesn't have a Stealth mode You can't even install McAfee Firewall on Lunix! Lunix sucks, Windows is the best OS ever because it has STealth.
Re:Stealth? *ARGGGH* (Score:3, Insightful)
It's Microsoft stupid because the are relying on their own software to be without more faults. (There have been many.)
Who want's to use NetBIOS over the internet (i.e. without a tunnel)? He's not sane!
Intelligent firewall setting would have been what most firewalls call "reject", that means, sending RESET in return if a
Re:Stealth? *ARGGGH* (Score:3, Funny)
How are you defining 'hint of a clue'?
I turned it off. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I turned it off. (Score:4, Informative)
I'm curious; how did you come up with the 20mb number?
Better than nothing? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Better than nothing? (Score:5, Insightful)
Being installed by default is a "feature" more important in real life than any other.
(Yes, I'd run something else in addition).
Re:Better than nothing? (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft's user testing showed that asking users to approve every application trying to communicate with the Internet tends to backfire.
"If you flood the user with messages like that, they say 'yes' all the time," he says.
Just like making passwords minimum 25 character length won't improve security as people will just write them down. This is good enough for the majority.
Re:Better than nothing? (Score:3, Insightful)
Writing down your password isn't as bad as you may think. Seriously. I brute-force your password much easier than I can break into your office and steal your sticky note. Or even better, if you keep the password in your wallet, my task is even more difficult.
SP2 is a security hole in itself. (Score:5, Insightful)
-Chris
Re:SP2 is a security hole in itself. (Score:4, Interesting)
The FW app would pop-up automatically to ask the user if they wanted to allow certain traffic the first time it occured. The problem I found was that there didn't have to be a user logged in.
This was on a co-workers machine and so of course while he was out of the office I tried to access his machine. When the FW app prompted with the pop-up, I just told it to always allow my host access to his machine.
Two problems I figured:
1. The app should have never prompted when the user was not actively using the system.
2. The OS should not allow input when there isn't anyone logged in.
Re:SP2 is a security hole in itself. (Score:5, Funny)
lemme tell you, that'll make it a bitch to log in.
Re:SP2 is a security hole in itself. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:SP2 is a security hole in itself. (Score:3, Interesting)
Press SHIFT+F10 at that screen. You get a full CMD console...
EXCEPT as SYSTEM! Not as Administrator, but SYSTEM!!
Ummm, owned?
Re:SP2 is a security hole in itself. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:SP2 is a security hole in itself. (Score:5, Interesting)
I am certain there will be office techs who have to install SP2 on more than one machine in a day who will leave the machine unattended while they start the install on others. That means that am office drone could see the reboot dialog, click OK, and wind up being presented with a dialog that changes an administrative setting.
They took the easy path. The easy path is rarely the secure path. You can't assume that the admin will be there for the reboot unless you inform the admin it is necessary.
-Chris
Re:SP2 is a security hole in itself. (Score:3, Informative)
Install nearly any type of linux, but let's say Mandrake...
(1) Do all the configuration stuff
(2) Choose the software you want
(3) Get several cups of coffee while it spends an hou
Re:SP2 is a security hole in itself. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:SP2 is a security hole in itself. (Score:3, Insightful)
-Chris
It's Microsoft! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It's Microsoft! (Score:5, Insightful)
Honestly, the most logical place to implement a firewall is in the OS TCP stack. That's how linux does it. Now, a userspace program to configure it makes sense, and there are a millions competing linux projects to provide somewhat sane front ends to iptables, but the actual filtering should be handled by the OS.
And it doesn't really make sense to have 3rd parties modifying the TCP stack - talk about the potential to break stuff.
Honestly, I don't mind MS bundling free stuff with their OS. Now, when they make OEMs sign agreements not to include competing products as well, that is a problem (such as the way they banned Netscape from being pre-installed). And if the behavior of the windows firewall were to break the TCP standard and make it less compatible with non-windows internet servers, then that would also be a problem. However, nobody screams about putting Cisco out of business by putting a firewall in linux...
Re:It's Microsoft! (Score:3, Interesting)
MS shot themselves in the foot with IE (Score:5, Interesting)
If M$ could go back a few years, they would see that not putting IE in the OS would have avoided all the anti-trust problems AND made windows more secure. LOL at M$.
Re:MS shot themselves in the foot with IE (Score:4, Insightful)
MS didn't see an alternative. (Score:4, Insightful)
Microsoft doesn't care about any problem that doesn't hurt their bottom line. It's rare that any company does: that's just part of being a limited liability corporation. And in 1996 and 1997, security wasn't an issue, it didn't win sales, so they didn't care.
Re:MS shot themselves in the foot with IE (Score:3, Interesting)
Microsoft did exactly what they knew they had to do to head off the gravest threat they
wow, neat. (Score:3, Funny)
The whole point of the firewall is so that bad applications (like the ones that would turn a firewall off) don't get installed in the first place.
And as far as I can tell, all the article is talking about is the fact that it asks you if you want to keep blocking a program or not. And it DOES ask you for every program that uses the LAN/internet/whatever.
And do you honestly think that it's impossible to turn off Zone Alarm and those other ones with an application? I'm willing to bet that it's possible
TerminateProcess (Score:3, Insightful)
The article's website is timing out, but can't you 'turn off' Norton, Zonealarm by simply doing a WM_CLOSE or TerminateProcess anyway?
If the program has managed to make its way onto the host machine, then that is when the firewall isn't doing it's job.
Re:TerminateProcess (Score:5, Insightful)
Saying it's a bad idea for the reason stated in the write-up is just plain ignorant.
Get a grip (Score:4, Insightful)
I have run Windows XP Professional since its release. I run my box 24x7 connected to a 2MBit cable connection. I use the Windows firewall and have auto-updates downloaded automatically. I have an ftp port open using the Microsoft/IIS ftp server. I have a port open for remote desktop. It's been this way for 2+ years.My box has never been hacked into.
So, now some wise asses can ask for my IP address, sure. But my point is that by taking just the most basic precautions, you reduce your chance of being hacked to just about nothing.
The new firewall may not be perfect, but it will further reduce the number of easy targets, which is a giant step forward.
Re:Get a grip (Score:3, Insightful)
Out of curiosity, how do you know you haven't been hacked? I mean, I keep track of my logs, watch disk space usage, don't keep the machine on all the time, run AV and spyware detection software, etc., so I'm pretty confident that no one pwns my box, but if I didn't do any of that, particularly the log file monitoring, it would be pretty tough to tell whether I was hacked or not.
Granted, if you were hacked, you'd probably notice performance degredation and get errors about your FTP directory's drive filli
Re:Get a grip (Score:5, Funny)
This can also be read as:
I never got a popup reading "ZOMG! J00ve b33n h4xx043d by da ch1n33z3!!1!1one!eleven lolololz"
Re:Get a grip (Score:5, Insightful)
Marcus Ranum's latest essay suggests that most of security isn't about doing smart things, but instead about avoiding doing dumb things.
I bet your success also depended on not downloading animated cursors and password managers.
That "just about nothing" chance also depends on a benign threat model. If you were whitehouse.gov, microsoft.com, or a bank's wire transfer department, you'd need more than "the most basic precautions". Against automated attack scripts your precautions are good.
Re:Get a grip (Score:3, Insightful)
I guess you can chalk not being hacked up to shear luck, since every time you use your FTP server remotely, you're sending your username and password in the clear. This is nothing specific to Microsoft -- every FTP server is like this (except SFTP, of course). You really should consider using SSH and SCP instead. For Windows, I'd recommend using Cygwin's version of OpenSSH (plus, that gives you a working shell program, as opposed to the atrocit
No outbound blocking (Score:5, Interesting)
So for average users XP firewall is a good thing since you don't have to know anything, but we (Slashdot users and internet savvy) demand more.
Re:No outbound blocking (Score:3, Interesting)
Also because Microsoft's take on security is that once malware is installed it's Game Over. They've got a point. Your computer is the wrong turf on which to fight intruders unless you have a mandatory access control system.
Ridiculous. (Score:5, Insightful)
That Flexbeta article is just spreading FUD. (Score:5, Insightful)
I question their results.. (Score:4, Interesting)
I want to cover a few definitaions that aren't in the article. If they are using different definitions for these terms, they are going to confuse a lot of people (and may be confused themselves).
For the 'Connect' scan, the tester will have sent a 'SYN' packet to the port being tested. The 'Stealthed' ports will have sent back no response at all. The 'Closed' ports will have sent back an ACK/RST packet.
For the 'SYN' scan, the tester will have sent a 'SYN' packet to the port being tested. The 'Stealthed' ports will have sent back no response at all. At this point, the 'SYN' scan is identical to the 'Connect' scan, so the 'closed' ports should have sent back ACK/RST.
This leads me to believe that either the testers system was broken, the target system firewall was in a different state during the SYN scan, or there is something really weird going on there.
As for the 'Turning Off' claim, that appears to be when the user or process has admin rights. As with the ludicrous Trend Anti-Virus 'vulnerability' posted to Bugtraq last week, it's unreasonable to expect software to 'defend' against being reconfigured or turned off by an authorised administrator.
I've just realised I'm defending M$ here
Yes, well... (Score:5, Insightful)
In any event, it's obvious this is not a cure-all since it won't block outgoing connections. But it's still a big improvement and ought to immunize XP users against at least one class of attacks. In fact, coupled with a virus (especially an email virus) scanner it ought to wipe out 99.95% of all Windows desktop compromises. That's a pretty damn big step and we should credit MS for taking it, even if it doesn't go quite as far as we'd like.
Re:Yes, well... (Score:3, Insightful)
That's right. Kid Pix requires Administrator-level rights or it simply will not run.
It sounds like you and others at your school don't know how to properly install, configure and administrate Windows NT (4/2000/XP)
I've setup quite a number of Windows XP PCs for "family" use, with limited accounts for the children. Their software/games are setup properly, and works fine unde
Re:Yes, well... (Score:3, Insightful)
You can also create powerful applications that do not require admin rights (VS.NET 2003 for example).
Re:Yes, well... (Score:3, Insightful)
Blame your software vendor for making THEIR software incompatible with limited user accounts in windows. Well written software doesn't do this and at work we have many computers set at "user" accounts with no problems.
In other words, its not windows, its Kid Pix and whatever else you're buying with your IT dollars. I would hope that our tax dollars wouldn't be wasted on crappy applications.
Please, continue the uninfor
You can't firewall yourself (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't care if you're Windows Firewall or Zone Alarm, any settings the user can change an application can also change, because no application that the user runs can have any more rights than the user. Whatever the user interface application does, another application can do as well.
Actually... (Score:3, Insightful)
Firewall rules can only be changed as root.
Because of the extensive use of Linux in shell hosting enviroments Linux is fairly robust against local exploits. Windows is still terribly weak to local privlage escilation.
Obviously there are ways around (say sabotaging the users enviroment and tricking them into giving the software root access), but it actually mak
Ignorant and Misleading (Score:5, Insightful)
First of all, if the user using the machine is running as an admin, there is ABSOLUTELY NO WAY TO PREVENT THE FIREWALL FROM BEING DISABLED BY A 3RD PARTY PIECE OF SOFTWARE. Period. Guess what! Zonealarm and Symantec's stuff has the same 'fault'. If I have admin privs, and I run a piece of software (unless it's managed like
Software running as a non-admin user CANNOT TURN OFF THE FIREWALL. That's all you can expect.
Second, outgoing protection just makes stupid people feel better. Any programmer with a clue can write software that gets around outgoing firewall protection. It took me about 20 minutes with VB (yeah, VB!!!) to write a proof of concept app that is able to do whatever it wants on the net even with Zonealarm installed.
The only way to reliably restrict outgoing communications is at the borders of the network, not on the machine generating the traffic.
All this FUD makes me sick.
Misinformed review (Score:5, Insightful)
Balls. The fact the Windows Firewall can be turned off makes it exactly the same as every other personal firewall, including ZA and Sygate.
Malware has been disabling the firewalls of machines it infects for years. It is simply not possible for a firewall to remain an effective security measure on a machine where hostile code has been run at the same level of privilege.
Once the attacker's code is running on your machine, the game is over and you have lost. Until we get full operating-system level sandboxing (whereby applications and users are fully protected from each other's interference until the user/admin explicitly grants rights), this will always be the case.
The main difference between the Windows Firewall and other personal firewalls is that it only blocks incoming traffic. But so what? An outgoing traffic block is of no use if the outgoing traffic is generated by hostile code on the local machine, as it can just as easily shut the firewall down completely.
Other firewalls still provided the feature because it figured most malware wouldn't bother detect and kill all the different brands of firewall. But Windows Firewall, soon to be very widely installed due to its default-on nature, would present a much more attractive target; soon every new virus, worm and piece of spyware would turn the block off as the first thing it did. Therefore the feature would be offer zero additional security.
Flexbeta's reviewer seems to have grasped the vocabulary of security countermeasures with no actual grasp of their practical implications. In summary: feh.
Important note for newbies. (Score:4, Insightful)
Switching the firewall off [no matter how weak it is] while connected to the net will open your machine up to all sorts of problems.
Lay off Microsoft (Score:4, Informative)
MS bashing on here never bothered me until SP2 came out when A LOT of people mainly wrote it off as crap. They did a damn good job this time and a lot of you people should stop bitching about them.
Market Comparison: OS X Internet Firewall (Score:5, Interesting)
Again, if you're using it for serious stuff you'd add a hardware FW at the network perimeter.
Sort of Missing the Point... (Score:5, Interesting)
If anyone reading Slashdot *needed* SP2 to make their XP system secure you should be ashamed of yourself. =)
So while it's not perfect, it's a situation where anything helps.
This also leaves the door open for other vendors who want to provide better or different firewall solutions. Ditto with not adding AV software.
Remember, unlike Apple and Linux distros MS can't bundle much into their OS unless they want to get dragged back to court...
The Firewall in XP (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft did the right thing (Score:3, Interesting)
What really pissed me off was the comment that Zone Alarm people gave that a worm could turn off the firewall. OK....A worm could turn off their product too.
There has also been criticism that the firewall doesn't block outgoing connections. I guarantee you if they did do that, firewall manufacturers and "Type A" slashdot readers would be crying anti-trust.
bizarre (Score:5, Insightful)
That's a really lame complaint. If a program has the proper authorities, or can hack the proper authorities, then of course it can stop the operating of another application.
In Unix, they call it "kill".
How many Windows viruses will auto kill your task-window process whenever they see it come up? I bet lots of them. Same deal.
While delousing Windows boxes, I usually find myself downloading the least popular anti-virus programs I can possibly find to do it, because then I am usually able to get it running on the machine without bringing the whole system down.. any good virus would automatically kill norton, mcafee, and other popular virus scanners..
and even if you can't kill the running process, if you have access to change the configuration files, then you can effectively take it down that way as well..
think about your complaints before you make them!
Insecurity: A People Problem Tech Won't Solve (Score:5, Interesting)
Badmouthing Microsoft for rolling out a less-than-perfect firewall is more than a bit hypocritical when much of it comes in the form of kneejerk ritualistic abuse from open source users who couldn't implement a firewall if it involved anything more complicated than selected "Yes" during their Linux installation.
Insecurity on the network is, in the end, a human problem. Computers do what they're told. The only effective solution is to go after the behavior and the people who cause the insecurity.
wha? (Score:3, Insightful)
That's horrible, horrible logic. I'm supressing lines of cursing and name calling due to that little line you just spouted because it is just plain stupid to say that. For one, pretty much any program can do anything it pleases if the user has permission to.
What 90% of people forget is that the great majority of users are running windows in an administrator's permission set. It's just like someone running their linux box as root. You run a certian program, you're screwed.
Give me root permissions on your unix machine and I'll write a nice little script, not even a program, to do lots of nice little things to your computer.
Does the name Pavlov Ring a Bell? (Score:4, Insightful)
People get rapidly conditioned to click the yes button, to permit the traffic to pass, because they quickly find out that if they click no, something breaks (i.e. IM Client).
What happens is that users become afraid to click no, for fear of breaking something - which effectivly negates the integrity of the firewall.
It appears that MS has integrated it pretty well into windows (duh, would you expect anything else?), to allow dynamic opening and closing of ports without having to confirm each connection with the user.
It's not a goof.... (Score:3, Insightful)
of course, pcflank.com didn't find anything to worry about on my computer. then again, my computer's a mac... (no, I don't care about karma, do what ya gotta do)
Inherent insecurities (Score:3, Insightful)
They run on the exact machine they are supposed to protect, often under the same user account (since Windows programs often want to run as Administrator, so lots of people have administrator privileges on their "normal" accounts).
Obviously, they can therefore easily be defeated by trojans.
Then there's a few social problems. Having a car with additional security (big crumple zones, ABS, SIPS, airbag,
A big point is, PFWs are not trivial to write and test, and often have to run as superuser. This can actually mean that they introduce new security holes.
Re:Of course. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Of course. (Score:5, Informative)
"Basic clue about CS -- it's a good thing."
Definitely. And while we're at it, maybe we should send the flexbeta editors a one-line shell script that'll disable the OpenBSD packet filter. I'm sure watching their heads explode would be fun.
What the hell do users expect if they run trojans under admin-accounts... "the API used to manage the Windows Firewall could also be used by attackers to modify the software or turn it off." Ya think??
Re:Hardware Firewall (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Home routers aren't really firewalls (Score:3, Interesting)
Former Microsoftie Here (Score:5, Insightful)
The Windows Firewall is probably adequate if you only have a single computer and are connecting to the internet.
It is not built for network (ICS traffic bypasses any ICF filters) and so has absolutely no value for perimeter value.
Like most commercial products from Microsoft, supportability in Windows Firewall is more important than security. If you need security over supportability by Microsoft staff, this is not the product for you. But it is not bad for what it does.
It also has no outbound controls, unlike other personal firewalls. This is a slight issue, but I don't think it is major (what about hijacking IE to make the connections?)
Re:Former Microsoftie Here (Score:5, Insightful)
The parent makes the right point here. If I want to bypass any outbound firewall, all I have to do is spin up the user's default web browser to make a port 80 connection to the outside world and pass information in the HTTP GET command. Spinning up such a process is really quite straightforward: just run http://foo with ShellExecute, passing whatever information you want in the URL.
The whole furore about outbound blocking is bizarre, in my opinion. Outbound blocking of random ports provides no protection, but only the illusion of protection.
Re:Um.... wait a second. (Score:5, Informative)
Wrong. The security console, by default, will pop up a warning that the firewall is inactive. I've seen this myself when diabling the firewall for even a single connection. The only way to disable the warning is to turn off firewall status monitoring.
Re:Ports still open? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Stop bitching about 3rd party vendors (Score:3, Interesting)
Hows about, a firewall should not be implemented in software on the same pc its protecting.
But it sure is cheaper and easier than buying a hardware firewall or buying/setting up a dedicated software firewall.
Re:Mac ?? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Best way to setup an extra computer as a firewa (Score:3, Informative)
Under some of these distros, the file erver can be the same machine, but it is no reccomended. Every service you add on the forewal machine increased the risk of a vulnerability. Most of the time you would be fine, but there is still a risk.
The firewall PC can be very low powered - Pentium 100MHz with a 2GB
Re:Riiight... (Score:3, Interesting)
I still prefer keeping the firewall to an independent, stripped down system (definitely not on the same host I'm trying to protect). Linux 2.4 and later, with netfilter (iptables) do support opening up ports dynamically based on program access.
Simply, default action