Main Area and Open Discussion > General Software Discussion
Best free firewall for Windows?
f0dder:
Tuxman: saying that there's no "firewall for windows" is nonsense - but I do agree that running outgoing traffic blocking on the machine you're trying to firewall is pretty much useless.
Tuxman:
What do you think a "firewall for Windows" is then?
f0dder:
Gee, dunno - ISA / ForeFront?
Also, while I haven't used PFWs for many years because I don't really believe in blocking outgoing traffic, they should be just fine for actually blocking based on ports (as long as it's a non-retarded PFW and you're not running under an admin account). And, while possible to subvert to some extent, PFWs have an advantage over external FWs in that connections can be linked to applications... whereas an external FW will always let outoing port80 traffic through, and doesn't care that it's being done from RogueApp.exe. (Of course RogueApp.exe can try to inject itself into iexplore.exe and there's various tricks and nasty things that can be done, so it's not 100% failsafe...)
If you really want it locked down, you're going to combine border gateway firewall (with SPI) with per-machine PFWs.
Tuxman:
A PFW is not a firewall. A firewall is p.d. a system that protects your network from outside.
But you can surely tell me what would be the use of it?
f0dder:
PFWs do filter incoming data too, so they are firewalls. And gateway firewalls very often block outgoing traffic as well (for whatever reason; my school has a pretty restrictive policy and only allows a few things like ftp, http, ssh, svn outgoing - probably based on port numbers rather than SPI, though).
As I've already said, I'm not much of a believer in blocking outgoing traffic for most people, since the damage is already done if you've got malware on your system. It does add an extra level of defense against getting your data leaked, though, and that can be valuable.
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page
[*] Previous page
Go to full version