Steven
Fri Apr 16 14:20:57 CDT 2004
I personally think the built in XP ICF firewall is sufficient for the vast
majority of users. What it lacks is the ability to control oubound access
and have firewall rules for mapping applications to a firewall rule possibly
protected by a MD5 hash those features may be important in situations where
other users or employees may be using the computer and attemp to do
unathorized internet access. But wait the crowds yell, if you have a trojan
or backdoor then ZA will let you know and possibly stop access. That is
true, but if you have a trojan/backdoor then you have other serious problems
such as not using a quality virus protection that also scans emails and
doing regular system scans and keeping critical updates current along with a
regular parasite scan with AdAware/Spybot. However I have found that the
average user has problems configuring a personal firewall and many times
hits yes when they should hit no and now they have just created a hole in
their firewall where in XP with ICF since they never get such messages, they
at least always have inbound protection which is where by far the greatest
threats are at. An improperly configured firewall can be much more
frustrating and LESS protective than the ICF firewall IMHO. --- Steve
http://www.microsoft.com/security/protect/
"devmal" <anonymous@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:9E811E0F-CDEE-4FC8-A5B1-ED888C42AE12@microsoft.com...
> I am thinking of installing a firewall such as zonealarm ..should I switch
off the in built firewall thats with XP or is XP's firewall suffienient
..................