"AliceZ" <AliceZ@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:1A96E465-10D8-4A3B-80D0-05FA04A2A2A2@microsoft.com...
> I just bought a Toshbia A305 S6825 notebook with Vista Premium sp1 (which
> I
> was told had good security programs installed) and someone told me
> yesterday
> that the Firewall on Virsta Premium is not (very) effective. They
> suggested I
> should use the (new) ZA (which is about 45MB, so they say). They mentioned
> that they used "ShieldsUP" to test Vista Premium's Firewall and found a
> "ping" (don't know what that is!) got through.
ShieldsUP is written by Steve Gibson, whom some revere as a security genius,
and the rest of us think he's a plagiarising idiot who doesn't know what
he's talking about.
It has been a long time since 'ping' was anything remotely like a security
threat. I personally like keeping it in place, as it is used as a measure of
network connectivity.
The firewall in Windows Vista is sufficient for most purposes, and is
configurable. ZoneAlarm (what 'ZA' usually stands for) is something of a
fashion, and if you want a program that keeps asking "is it okay to let this
application communicate to the Internet?", and believe that you can
competently answer that question, then perhaps it's for you. However,
Windows Vista's firewall does a thoroughly competent job of preventing
traffic that you didn't invite.
> Does anyone have any thoughts/suggestions about the Vista Home Premium's
> Firewall? Or is this just too "hi tech" for me to get worried about now
> since
> I just bought the new Toshiba with Vista Home Premium sp1 and since I am a
> novice at all of this? I am trying to learn so much, as soon as possible,
> which is a bit confusing and daunting
Perhaps now is not the time to be adding a new program that is going to
assume you understand what you're doing?
Make sure you keep patched, keep your anti-virus and anti-spyware updated
(there are free anti-virus and anti-spyware programs, if you can't afford to
keep current on the short-term subscription to whatever came with your
system), and you should be ahead of most people.
The big additional feature most people will suggest ZoneAlarm for is that of
"outbound filtering". In an enterprise, this could be useful, in that it
allows you to prevent policy-breaking programs from communicating outside
the system - for a home user, it's "game over" already if you have an
unauthorised program installed on your system. [And in an enterprise, there
are better tools than ZoneAlarm available - an enterprise would not trust a
potentially-malicious machine to police itself]
Alun.
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