[thelist] security strategy - is mine flawed?

Tony Crockford tonyc at boldfish.co.uk
Sun Nov 16 15:43:26 CST 2003


On Sun, 16 Nov 2003 12:24:12 -0800 (PST), Tom Dell'Aringa 
<pixelmech at yahoo.com> wrote:

> 1 - ZoneAlarm as my firewall
> 2 - NAV, completely updated
> 3 - I *Never* install any of those Kazaa like garbage.
>
> I do not have the Win firewall on, but should I? Some people advocate
> disabling ActiveX altogether. But what effect would this have on my
> system for things I *DO* want to run?
>
> Thanks
>
> Tom

Tom,

For one reason and another I moved away from Norton (too expensive and not 
always updated quickly enough) and Zonealarm (I upgraded to a version that 
kept crashing win2k)

I'm now using Computer Associates EZ Antivirus which has unattended 
updates and seems to be faster at spotting a virus, and Sygate Personal 
firewall Pro because it stopped the most attempts at getting onto my 
machine and allowed me to *permit* outgoing access one application at a 
time.

In the last two years of using these the only problems I've seen were when 
I did a fresh install of winXP on a new laptop and ventured onto the net 
for updates without protection - wham, instant blaster worm, which was 
picked up, the instant I connected the laptop to the network, by Sygate 
reporting an intrusion attempt from the IP address I'd just assigned to 
the laptop!

Others will advise a hardware firewall I'm sure, but the combination of 
Sygate and EZAV (on realtime monitoring) have worked very well for me.


HTH

Tony


More information about the thelist mailing list