Rich Curtis

Help-
Do I need to install a seperate firewall when running WinXP and IE6 since it already has a firewall?

I have not as far as I know had any problems to date with hacking but friends who have recently installed personal firewalls have reported hits from potential hackers in other countries.

Also is zonealarm any good compared to Nortons Mcafee etc?

The pro version looks good at $30 since it stops pop-ups, monitors cookies etc.


Cheers Rich

Nick VR4

Rich
IMHO yes ( i posted this on the MLR website to )
Windows XP: bugs

ZDNet User's Guide
24 May 2002
Microsoft would have us believe that XP is the most secure operating system it has released to date. But the nine security updates the company has released since XP's launch belie that claim.


In fact, one problem -- buffer overrun vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer and Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) -- poses such a severe threat that the FBI got involved. Microsoft says that a hole in the Plug and Play software could conceivably allow a malicious hacker to take complete control of your PC. Worse, the security hole applied to every XP user -- the OS ships with Universal Plug and Play turned on by default. Don't have the patch yet? Get it now at Microsoft's TechNet site.

Additional new security patches include a fix for the Microsoft Java Virtual Machine, which, if left unpatched, can let Java applets from Web sites silently reroute all browser traffic to the applet's host without the user's knowledge. Yet another patch fixes an ‘Unchecked buffer in the Multiple UNC Provider’, a problem that allows a hacker to send a malformed data request to a PC to either run programs at will or cause the computer to restart. Click Start > Programs and run Windows Update to access all the available patches.
Interestingly, none of XP's security updates have anything to do with the once-feared raw sockets support included in XP's TCP/IP network protocol drivers. Many sceptics believed that XP's raw sockets support posed a security threat because it allows programmers to generate data transmissions from one computer and make them appear to come from a different one -- a technique used in distributed denial-of-service attacks.

I have XP at home and use McAfee firewall (biased opion)easy install and block everything at first
Then let it tell you whats attempting to go out or incoming and you can decide if you allow or not
easy chesy peasy
Nick

Richard Curtis

Cheers Nick

Thanks for the advice

Rich

awd2000

I go along with Nick's view - I've been using ZoneAlarm (both the free and pro versions) for ages and would never go online without at least a software firewall.

You'd be amazed at the amount of port scans and stuff that gets trapped. I know 99.9% of it is just script-kiddies doing mass trawls for open ports but you never know...

AWD

[Edited by awd2000 - 4/10/2003 9:51:03 PM]