Re: New Computer? Six Steps to Safer Surfing

[Barney Wolff <barney () databus com>]

On Sun, Dec 19, 2004 at 05:47:28PM -0500, Sean Donelan wrote:
> What's more interesting is the highest infection rate of all is for homes
> with laptop/mobile computers.  Even when your home broadband modem/gateway
> has a firewall, when you take your laptop out of the home you lose
> what little protection you had. Then you bring the infection back inside
> and infect all your other home computers behind the gateway/firewall.
> The crunchy outside, soft-chewy inside rule applies to home computers too.

Perhaps, then, one should not be so quick to disparage software-based
firewalls, resident on the computer itself.

After all, there is really no such thing as a "hardware-based" firewall.
bugtraq has plenty of reports of software bugs in firewalls resident on
dedicated hardware.

"Defense in depth" would suggest using both.

-- 
Barney Wolff         http://www.databus.com/bwresume.pdf
I'm available by contract or FT, in the NYC metro area or via the 'Net.