The following items are the things you should do as an Internet user:

• Install antivirus software to your machine and make sure you maintain it. There is more than a dozen good antivirus software that you can purchase or download free. Antivirus software scans your computer every certain period to check for known viruses. It also checks for viruses on your incoming electronic mails. Antivirus software usually has regular monthly updates to check that the software can catch up with the new virus definitions. This updates are very important because everyday new viruses are being discovered. Though there are automatic updates, it is still better to regularly check the vendor’s website.

*watch out for continuation post*

What Dumb Firewalls don’t do

a)They don’t monitor your configuration files

b)They don’t monitor your registry

c)They don’t monitor your startup folders

d)They don’t scan for or remove Trojans

e)They don’t provide a list of socket connections

f)They don’t do what a real firewall does, keep out unwanted products in an intelligent manner and not on a per application basis.

Real protection will only come from an official antivirus program which provides a multitude of useful protection, performs regular scans on your disk to check up on any missed viruses, and watches over your entire system.

Dumb Firewall programs provide absolutely NO protection whatsoever against backdoor programs that come built into Internet servers such as NetSnooper Gold. NetSnooper is an example of what ANY program can do to gain access to your PC once it has passed through posing as one of your trusted Internet programs.

If the user were to trust a program such as mIRC they would also be trusting any backdoored scripts that the program may load. Your computer could also be a host used to infect other computers. All of this can easily be done without even so much as a single warning bell from a Dumb Firewall.

The term “Dumb Firewall” is a term to describe a firewall program that has very little intelligence, hence its name. It’s primary function is to simply block ALL Internet connections by default. Some of these may ask you whether you trust a program before it will allow inbound or outbound connections to your computer. Users that choose not to trust the program may find that their Internet program cut off already. On the other hand, if they choose to trust the ‘WRONG’ program, they may be allowing hackers into their computer without ANY future warnings from the Dumb Firewall.

• McAfee Personal Firewall Plus
  This product is somewhat expensive but it is always worth all the bucks you shell out. McAffee Personal Firewall Plus is being sold in a yearly subscription basis rather than the one-time purchase. This kind of purchase may appeal to some buyers. Also, there is no existing free trial version for this product.
  Comparatively, this firewall software have a small footprint, which means it only requires low memory usage. However, McAfee for Windows ICS and IIS networks and web servers are not supported.

Now that you have a fairly good background about the top personal firewall software, it is now your responsibility to review and choose one to use for your home network protection.

Hacker Eliminator would not be considered a firewall, if you were to define a firewall as to mean that it is something that would block port connections made to your computer, or to keep users inside your network from going out to other networks. Even though these types of firewalls and firewall programs have their uses for specific jobs, they also tend to give computer users a false sense of security. Which is why a lot of people are easily targeted by hackers and viruses. They simply don’t think the computer is worth the time spending countless days over, examining each type of firewall and choosing the best one.

With technology now moving faster than ever and vocabulary not being defined quickly enough, there are no exact technical terms today that are compiled into a list of rules restricting what makes up a firewall and what doesn’t. New words used on the Internet such as Stealth, Drone, R.A.T, Key Logger, and many others are not yet solidly defined in dictionary terms. Until now, we have only relied upon urban dictionaries and through word of mouth to know their definitions. With such a hopeless case in front of us, the only thing that we can do is to keep ourselves updated, be resourceful, and be sensitive to the changes of time. One blink and you will miss it.

A security research firm, Heise Security, is criticizing Leopard’s security, or more specifically, the system’s firewall.

The firm was highly critical and declared that the firewall failed every test. The tests revolved around Apple’s default configuration and whether the firewall configured correctly due to user input.

According to them, Leopard’s firewall is not activated by default and, even when activated, it does not behave as one should expect. Network connections to non-authorised services can still be established and even under “Block all incoming connections” , the most restrictive setting, it still allows access to system services from the internet.

Apply acknowledges that the system services that it communicated with in its tests did not seem immediately prone to exploit.