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Personal Firewalls Mostly Useless, Says Mail & Guardian
hweimer writes "More and more security researchs come to the conclusion that personal firewalls are ineffective in controlling outbound traffic. An article in the Mail & Guardian online mentions a test that 'showed that the software often causes more problems than it solves. Not one of the six firewall programs the magazine tested, regardless of whether commercial or freeware, could prevent all attempts from the test programs at establishing outgoing connections between the PC and the internet.' Simple PoCs are available, too."
Yes, they may be ineffective in controlling outbound traffic. However, that's not the real point of a personal firewall.
Without a personal firewall, users have a huge issue with inbound traffic when it comes to security, especially in the Windows "territories." I'll never forget the day that I left open an unpatched WinXP box after a fresh install. I watched all of the script kiddies and automated worms go at it from my passive OpenBSD monitoring box. That machine was hacked in under ten minutes just because I left it there, open to the Internet. So, useless? No.
Yes, I agree. The title should say " Personal (software) Firewalls Mostly Useless (for out bound traffic)". And that is unpreventable if the user is always logged in as an admin and runs malicious executables (or programs with known security issues, like older versions of browsers). This would be an issue, if a non-admin user could disable the firewall (which I guess is not easy, since the article does not mention that). So there is no real problem with the personal firewall software.
The firewalls are still very useful in preventing attacks due to OS vulnerabilities (like the Windows RPC issues). Anyway that is the main aim of personal firewalls, and the article does not have anything about the effectiveness of the firewall for inbound traffic.
If you want a secure outbound firewall the best bet is to use a dedicated gateway machine with the firewall (I use my very old laptop with BSD on it as a gateway)
The personal or desktop firewall is not supposed to be your first line of defense, it's supposed to be your last line of defense.
I recommend that people use both a hardware and software firewall, the hardware firewall protects you from the Internet in general. The software firewall protects you from the other computers on your local network.
But when it comes down to it, a firewall is as strong as it's weakest link, which is almost always the enduser. Running as admin while browsing, downloading software from untrusted sources, don't blame the firewall for user stupidity.
Talk about stating the obvious...this is the most useless article I have read in a long time.
1) Web browser and javascript bugs - nothing to do with hardware or software firewalls.
2) email issues, people going to bad sites etc. - nothing to do with hardware or software firewalls.
3) People should not run as administrator (or root) - wow, really.
4) People should stay up-to-date on patches - wow, totally amazingly obvious.
As you can't control people, they will always do these things. Good software firewalls show-up issues after they have made these mistakes, when rogue software tries to get out.
They also failed (or I missed it) to mention that software firewalls are good when you have multiple computers behind a hardware firewall - basically and infected computer will be blocked infecting other computers e.g. netbios etc.
Good computer security is a layered concept. From incoming hardware firewalls, IDS, software firewalls on individual computers, user training, security audits etc. I wish people and organizations writing articles would finally learn this. There is no 'magic' one solution.
Even though I'm behind a firewall, I use ZoneAlarm on all of my PCs so that I can catch what's communicating with the Internet and what's not. So far, it's done superbly well as far as I can tell.
For example, every time I play a media file in Windows Media Player, it tries to connect to the Internet not once but twice - once when Media Player fires up and once again after it's fnished! Excuse me? Exactly what is Media Player trying to figure out? Well, whatever it is, it's none of their damned business. Check "Remember this setting", click "Deny", and done.
Every time a process tries to act like a server, ZA also notifies me of that as well. It's a bit of a pain when I fire up a game server for the first time and the pop-up balloon interferes with the screen (whoops), but again it just shows that it's at least doing what it's supposed to do.
ZoneAlarm has its share of issues, but it clearly goes with the attitude of "better safe than sorry". There have been some rare times where the program itself doesn't start, for whatever reason, but its service gets started. On those rare occasions I've noticed that the service, if it can't communicate with the control daemon, or whatever you want to call it, it just blocks all network access. It could have just allowed everything instead and there'd be no way of knowing if it's working or not. Personally, I'd rather have it block all access. Not only does that let me know that there's a problem, but it's certainly keeping the PC's network connection secure.
Using a hardware firewall for inbound and ZA for outbound connections makes perfect sense as far as I'm concerned. It's not trouble-free, but they've been getting better at its stability over the past several revisions from what I can tell.
The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.
Actually, you to end with forgot ", On Windows". As you probably already know, you can set a BSD system's "securelevel" such that firewall rules, both in kernel and on disk, can't be altered without a reboot. You could hypothetically write a program that patches a BSD machine's boot sequence with one that unprotects the firewall configuration, alters it, changes the backup file so that the user won't get an email notification later on that details the differences, then resumes normal operation - all while hoping that the user or administrator doesn't notice the spontaneous reboot - but there aren't too many of those running around today.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?