Firewall or No firewall? please help
I would say to definitely use a firewall. The reasoning about dialup and different IP's has a flaw. The flaw is that if you have a trojan virus running, and no firewall or effective AV program, the trojan virus sits there and opens a port on your computer, and will either send out packets of data basically saying 'here is a wide open computer ripe for exploitation', or opens a port and waits for a incoming data stream. It doesn't matter that there is a different IP each time, this trojan would be broadcasting the current one. Some of these can identify themselves as coming from a specific computer.
The XP firewall does nothing to stop anything from connecting out, a third party firewall can monitor what is connecting out, and can allow or deny access to the internet.
|