OT: Hacker Attempt?

[Arralen]

frightlever said:
A router probably isn't necessary (though nice to have) - Slashdot linked an article today about the most secure firewalls and Jetico + Comodo were 2 of the top ones and both are free.

http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/12/12/1444251
http://www.matousec.com/projects/win...ts-results.php

The test isn't worth the electrons used for it, though:
They tested for "leakyness", not safety.
This is a fundamental error:

A) They used their own software-tools to test if something can get out from the 'protected' machine. If those tools have any resemblance to real threats, who knows? If they had infected their machines with real, up-to-date viruses and trojans and had scanned the in- and outgoing traffic for 'unauthorized' data (using a proxy with network card in promiscous mode), this would have made at least some sense.

B) If some malware tries to 'phone home' from your system, your security has already been breached and all safety measures failed: As you cannot reliably scan for infection with a virus scanner from the PC in question itself, you can't really keep any malware from doing whatever it wants (phone home, bring in some ads, whatever) because your OS is compromised, and there's no layer 'below' it that could control what its doing.
In fact, there are trojans in devlopment which move the whole operating system into some kind of virtual machine - where it will not and cannot ever know that it's in fact run under the control of a virus/trojan!!

C) Therefore, you don't need a personal firewall to keep something in, you need it to keep everything out if you're running windows, because that OS can't differentiate between internet and local network connections and offers all services to both nets (*) - what is a bad idea considering the fact that most of them are buggy and can be used to take over the machine.
(*this has changed with XP service pack 2, though: the integrated firewall closes all those services off from the internet. Therefore, with XPsp2 you don't need a seperate personal firewall unless you have very special demands)

D) A router is a better solution in 98% of cases, because if configured correctly it will simply throw away all data that your machine hasn't explicitly requested. To get infected, you must (more or less) run some malware yourself - keep in mind, though, that some security holes in browsers and mailprogramms allow for automated code execution if you open the 'wrong' website or mail. Internet Exploder and Outlook (Express) are especially prone to this, unless you turn off all their 'great' features, and even then to some degree.