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General discussion

How good are personal firewalls?

Feb 19, 2006 4:44AM PST

I had a frghtful experience with Norton a few years ago. I was loading an anti-trojan from nscclean, and it accessed its own site for an update, and Norton popped up with an attempt by WinCrash Trojan.

I tinkered with connecting to that computer on various ports and learned that simply attempting a connection on a known exploit port triggered bells, whistles and such from Norotn Personal Firewall. In fact the "Wincrash Trojan" was simply an ftp connection to the anti-trojan site for downloading the latest update.

How in the heck do folks live with personal firewalls that report normal net traffic as attempted exploits, just because some exploit package once used the same port?

Are all the personal firewalls like that one, 97% snake oil, ready to warn you to SHOW YOU THEY ARE DOING A JOB so that you are persuaded to buy the latest update?

I really don't know. I have a firewall on a separate machine and I set it up very carefully and firewalling/routing is ALL that the machine does. I used a free software package, and I can change its configuration ONLY from inside my local net with a browser and the right login and password.

So tell me, are the other personal firewalls (and maybe the latest Norton) any better?

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