Firewalls for broadband

[simpo two]

I believe there's a greater risk of unwelcome visitors when one is 'always on', esp with a a static ISP. I've been on ADSL for a week and have ZoneAlarm (free version), plus mt ISPs own one (which must be done at their place as it's not a download) and also enabled the XP one I found whilst poking about in the network connections area.

Have I missed anything?

Fortress Simpo. Trespassers will be deleted!

[Plotloss]

Should all be fine.

I used to just run Norton and that didnt allow anything through.

Now use ISA server and that seems fine also...

[FourWheelDrift]

Turn the XP one off it's not needed with Zone Alarm and will conflict with it.

[neil_cardiff]

Don't bother with the XP one until service pack 2 when it is by all accounts to include outbound packet filtering as well as inbound that it has at present.

One note I need to make, is that a majority of NAT routers that people buy to share their broadband connections, are by their very design firewalls. NAT Routers can be set to drop connections and can perform rudimentry firewall like tasks.

One tip is was given was to create a rule to forward Port 113 to a non existant ip adress as many NAT routers show this port as closed, and not stealth - and therefore making the ip visible.

Goto www.grc.com to find out more, and also do a nice handy port scan to test your firewalling.

Neil