Personal Firewalls Mostly Useless, Says Mail & Guardian

[FlyingPenguin]

http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=0 ... 7&from=rss

[TheSovereign]

....that is not what i would consider valid testing
http://www.mg.co.za/articlePage.aspx?ar ... _business/
that is the article thats being referred

it shows "browser plugins" as hacker software that was able to gain communication outbound
well a browser is allowed outbound
its not a failure of the firewall software its the failure of the webbrowser not launching plugins as seperate programs

the real problem is application only based firewalls
a long time ago their was a firewall program named AtGaurd it was both application based and tcp/ip rule based
it was the best firewall i hadever used, i cant use it anymore its not 2k/xp comp.
but ever since then ive never seen a firewall that worked the same way, they are either application based or ip rule based

and ive yet to see a software firewall that had packet filtration, which is the next logical step

[FlyingPenguin]

Oh I agree, although I think most people use firewalls incorrectly anyway. Firewalls are basically useless for inbound if you're behind a NAT router (and who isn't nowadays). What the firewall is useful for is to tell you if something hiding in your system is trying to phone home (registration apps, update apps, adware, spyware, virus, ircbot, etc).

I use Kerio Personal Firewall and really the only reason it's in there is to let me know about any unknown background processes.

I also like to use Kerio on my laptop because it does ad filtering which is nice when I'm on a cellular connection.