>(much like building a wall in front of your house because your doors >and Windows(TM) have broken locks). So do you expect Annie to fix these broken locks or doors?? What you are saying is that you would not need a wall if the locks worked properly?? This translates to not needing a firewall if the OS flaws are fixed. I always believed that some protection was better than none. If I had to guess I would say your home machine is Linux or BSD and most likely properly patched with no vulnerabilities. Do you still use iptables? I bet you would if your PC was directly connected to the Internet without a Hardware FW in front of it. But according to your logic it would be un-necessary to put a firewall in front of an OS whose locks worked properly. Windows, Linux, BSD all have services / ports listening by default...many of which do not need to be open to the world. It's no easier for a home user like Annie to edit the inetd.conf file to comment out services than it would be for her to stop Windows services. The point is the PFW makes it possible for the home user to limit their exposure without having a great deal of technical expertise. Is it perfect? No. But it is an improvement over having nothing between Annie and the Internet. --Chris -----Original Message----- From: full-disclosure-admin@lists.netsys.com [mailto:full-disclosure-admin@lists.netsys.com] On Behalf Of Erik van Straten Sent: Thursday, January 15, 2004 7:55 AM To: full-disclosure@lists.netsys.com Subject: Re: [Full-Disclosure] UTTER HORSESHIT: [was January 15 is Personal Firewall Day, help the cause] "http-equiv@excite.com" <1@malware.com>: > We hereby reject this utter horseshit unreservedly. Agreed - when it's intended to "protect" aunt Annie's Xmas present. It just makes NO SENSE to have PC's listening on lots of ports, by default on any interface, and then add a PFW to prevent anyone from accessing them. (much like building a wall in front of your house because your doors and Windows(TM) have broken locks). In particular because most Annie's have no clue what IP is, and undesired egress traffic easily bypasses PFW's (if the malware hasn't shut down the darn thing right away). Classic PFW = Snake Oil: http://www.samspade.org/d/firewalls.html If Annie's weren't members of Administrators, and members of Administrators would not have access to apps like IE and OE, and WindowsUpdate would not require admin privs to download, and there wouldn't be so many privesc sploitz, and the FS and registry would have much tighter perms by default, PFW's *would* make sense - for blocking undesired egress traffic. That is, provided that the PFW reliably starts before net I/O is possible, runs in "Safe Mode With Networking", and is not crowded with bugs itself. Cheers, Erik _______________________________________________ Full-Disclosure - We believe in it. Charter: http://lists.netsys.com/full-disclosure-charter.html
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