Firewall-new or old one ?

I'm just saying "On the average". Yes we can have users come out of the woodwork saying "I run an old one, it runs fine"...etc etc. We can have some people come out of the woodwork..stand on a soap box..and declare that they have never used an antivirus product or security product..and they've never gotten infected too!".

I've personally worked on machines that have had their software firewall knocked out. It has happened, there is some malware out there which does so, targets them, and disables them. It's not my opinion, it's a fact.

Your firewall may have worked well over all these years. I guess running a long done OS can have its advantages also..as most of the vulnerabilities out there are moving to targeting NT based machines....not many people have an interesting in investing the time to target old Win9X anymore.

Based on experience..whenever I'd have to work on someones PC...and I found it to be setup on a public IP address..it was almost always a big mess. Back then when I learned about routers and NAT..and started setting up PCs behind them as a rule of thumb...far less problems.

 

Even without NAT it's just as easy to unplug from the 'Net until the O/S is setup and a firewall is installed. Unfortunately, not everyone will think of this but it does work.

Especially the flashy, golden yellow product they so often flog

 

In an admin account this is true. Running from a limited user account should protect the firewall so as to make this a non-issue (as long as malware isn't later installed in the admin account). That being said, I personally think routers are a great way to go.

My experience too. 5 years ago malware was doing this. As a matter of fact, when we got wise to what was happening, we decided to password protect the firewall. The malware then asked for the password to change the configuration! Obviously, something more important was seriously wrong that malware was brought onto the system to begin with, but watching all this happen was a very interesting lesson.

 

I think you and I agree on right much involving this issue. Note my thread from a ways back. I thought there had to be this going on because when I loaded a firewall on a relatives machine, Verizon modem in use, the log said no inbounds. Just to make sure I was not missing something I started the thread to find out more, including what brands were out there for me to purchase.

https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=177215