[76650] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: New Computer? Six Steps to Safer Surfing
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Barney Wolff)
Sun Dec 19 18:14:38 2004
Date: Sun, 19 Dec 2004 18:13:56 -0500
From: Barney Wolff <barney@databus.com>
To: Sean Donelan <sean@donelan.com>
Cc: nanog@merit.edu
In-Reply-To: <Pine.GSO.4.58.0412191648470.651@clifden.donelan.com>
Errors-To: owner-nanog-outgoing@merit.edu
On Sun, Dec 19, 2004 at 05:47:28PM -0500, Sean Donelan wrote:
>
> What's more interesting is the highest infection rate of all is for homes
> with laptop/mobile computers. Even when your home broadband modem/gateway
> has a firewall, when you take your laptop out of the home you lose
> what little protection you had. Then you bring the infection back inside
> and infect all your other home computers behind the gateway/firewall.
> The crunchy outside, soft-chewy inside rule applies to home computers too.
Perhaps, then, one should not be so quick to disparage software-based
firewalls, resident on the computer itself.
After all, there is really no such thing as a "hardware-based" firewall.
bugtraq has plenty of reports of software bugs in firewalls resident on
dedicated hardware.
"Defense in depth" would suggest using both.
--
Barney Wolff http://www.databus.com/bwresume.pdf
I'm available by contract or FT, in the NYC metro area or via the 'Net.
