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Hi Jim,
First off, a firewall is a secondary line of defense anyway. A
firewall's best attribute is that, if you do get infected with
something that wants to send unauthorized *outbound* traffic, (like
your financial information), it can block that completely. But get
yourself behind an NAT router if you are not already there; this is
the first line against inbound snoopers -- a firewall on your local
box is a good second line. Buy a router that has a 'stealth' mode
(will not respond at *all* to connection attempts that are not
solicited -- pings, etc), and one that has packet inspection ability.
I use one that is probably only available in Japan, made by NTT-ME,
but these capabilities are available worldwide. I run my router in
stealth mode, and if I gave you my IP address and you port scanned
that address you'd get zero return -- nothing to indicate there is
even any kind of machine here at all. That alone is going to stop an
overwhelming percentage of attacks. Nothing is going to stop the CIA
if they are interested in you ^^_^^ or people with that kind of
capability.
As for a firewall, there is no need to spend a penny. Kerio 2.1.5 is
fine, free, and available all over the place. Kerio has recently
gone to a version 4, but it is new, much different, and I will let
them work *all* the bugs out on that until it achieves the same
reputation the old version has. I'm in no hurry. There should be
little or no reason to have firewall updates all the time. Either it
works, or it doesn't. If there was some great exploit discovered
that all firewall programs needed to be aware of, we'd all hear about
it in short order. Same with any Brand specific firewall; Kerio is
very popular and there are many fora for discussing it.
I use Symantec for AV. It's a nice pacifier, but that's really all,
because I know what to open and what to trash with prejudice. I know
it works only because I tested it; it never goes off in reality.
A SPAM filter is getting to be a must these days, too. I used to
maintain that the delete key was faster than messing with a SPAM
filter, but I finally put one on my box: K9, which is a Beysian type,
and extremely good, and free. I did add one line to the blacklist
filter:
# Common executable attachments
Body nocase matches :\[Attachment!(exe|bat|cmd|pif|scr|com):
So I never see these at all anymore. They were obvious anyway, but
now I don't even have to hit the delete key. For some reason, Poland
seems to be the great spawning ground of these children. Maybe TJ
has a hobby? ^_- (Of course if TJ was doing it, I'd be really
worried, and I would expect the attempts to be much more
sophisticated.)
Right now, after about 4 weeks of "training" the filter, I'm hitting
about 99 percent on SPAM detection. Zero false positives, only the
occasional false negative, and they are getting rarer and rarer.
People who have fully "trained" filters report 99.9x detection rates.
I almost feel sorry for the spammers. Almost . . .
So . . . an excellent free firewall is out there, an excellent free
SPAM filter; spend your money on AV updates and an NAT router, not to
mention anti-spyware and trojan detectors. (I'm waiting for mine to
detect Brad Pitt, but then he is Achilles, not a Trojan, so I'm
probably out of luck; I don't think it will detect DT, either.) ^_-
I just read recently that some academic has discovered that *every*
key on *any* keyboard emits its own distinct acoustic signature when
struck. This means that theoretically, a good acoustic snooper could
send all your keystrokes somewhere. Some wag suggested sound
encryption for keyboards as a counter measure. ^^_^^ The battle
between the good guys and bad guys rages on.
Yuki
Sunday, May 16, 2004, 11:54:42 PM, you wrote:
j> We all know how important online security is (firewalls and anti
j> virus software), especially for traders.
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