Firewalls!

SamuraiRock

So, recently a member of my family was victim of internet fraud or hacking or something and lost a substantial amount of money. I believe that his was an inside job perpetrated by someone on the inside of their investment deals, but my mother does all her banking online and has thusly (and possibly rightly so) grown wary of it. I figured I could ease her mind, and I suggested I could put a firewall and antivirus on her computer to help prevent keyloggers or spyware stealing her moniez.

All the computers in our house (and there are a few) have AVG Free and XP SP2 built-in firewall, or Vista built-in firewall. I figure you're not going to get the same quality of AV and firewall from free products that you would from a paid subscription. So I spent 5 minutes looking and decided on two candidates for my purchase:

Windows Live OneCare:
Pros: 40% off coupon, integrates really well with Windows, unobtrusive
Cons: totally sucks. I have the 90 day trial and I have a worm on my computer that I'm aware of, and I thought OneCare would get rid of it but all it did was tell me about it. "You have some malicious software, just thought I'd let you know!". Don't know about the firewall, but it seems nice so far.

Norton Internet Security 2007:
Pros: seems popular and secure, online reviews are good
Cons: totally sucks. One of my friends has it and whenever we lan, there's always some giant problems with his goddamn norton firewall which he refuses to turn off. Whenever I fix family/friends computers Norton is always the problem. It's bloated and slow and confusing and can't be uninstalled without getting a special uninstall utility from Symantec. More expensive than OneCare.

So I guess what I'm asking is, does anyone know which of those I should buy, or know of something better? I'm pretty sure my mother is not at risk since the connection passes through 2 x SP2 firewall after coming down our dialup connection and no hacker could be bothered waiting 15 minutes for each page to load as my mum does her banking, but it doesn't hurt to be on the safe side.

Iroh

I recommend investing in a good router with a hardware firewall built-in. It only costs about the same-as or slightly more than security software, and does a far better job keeping you safe.

cfgauss

SamuraiRock wrote: »

So, recently a member of my family was victim of internet fraud or hacking or something and lost a substantial amount of money. I believe that his was an inside job perpetrated by someone on the inside of their investment deals, but my mother does all her banking online and has thusly (and possibly rightly so) grown wary of it. I figured I could ease her mind, and I suggested I could put a firewall and antivirus on her computer to help prevent keyloggers or spyware stealing her moniez.

All the computers in our house (and there are a few) have AVG Free and XP SP2 built-in firewall, or Vista built-in firewall. I figure you're not going to get the same quality of AV and firewall from free products that you would from a paid subscription. So I spent 5 minutes looking and decided on two candidates for my purchase:

Windows Live OneCare:
Pros: 40% off coupon, integrates really well with Windows, unobtrusive
Cons: totally sucks. I have the 90 day trial and I have a worm on my computer that I'm aware of, and I thought OneCare would get rid of it but all it did was tell me about it. "You have some malicious software, just thought I'd let you know!". Don't know about the firewall, but it seems nice so far.

Norton Internet Security 2007:
Pros: seems popular and secure, online reviews are good
Cons: totally sucks. One of my friends has it and whenever we lan, there's always some giant problems with his goddamn norton firewall which he refuses to turn off. Whenever I fix family/friends computers Norton is always the problem. It's bloated and slow and confusing and can't be uninstalled without getting a special uninstall utility from Symantec. More expensive than OneCare.

So I guess what I'm asking is, does anyone know which of those I should buy, or know of something better? I'm pretty sure my mother is not at risk since the connection passes through 2 x SP2 firewall after coming down our dialup connection and no hacker could be bothered waiting 15 minutes for each page to load as my mum does her banking, but it doesn't hurt to be on the safe side.

What you have should be fine. 99.999% of stolen account information was stolen by phishing.

Six

Get a router with a firewall.

It's very unlikely your family member had their identity stolen because of your lack of a great firewall, though.

PirateJon

Don't buy norton. Pretty please with sugar on top, don't buy fucking norton.

embrik

Hardware firewalls are really your best option. Especially when you say that you have a few computers to protect. If you want to try your hand at building one from an old PC, there are plenty of free, Linux-based solutions like Smoothwall, IPCop, and m0n0wall.

SamuraiRock

For hardware firewalls, I can't do one with a router because of my network setup. We can only get dialup (thanks Australia!) which means my internet can't come in through the router (unless I buy a dial up router which I don't want to do), so my router, which is a wireless/wired combo to serve our desktops and laptops, has DHCP turned off and our connection comes in from an XP SP2 machine which does the DHCP. If I use the routers' DHCP it interferes with Windows's Internet Sharing's DHCP and the network goes down. So if I got the hardware firewall in it going, the connection would still come in from the internet unhindered, but I don't think I can do that anyway since it seems that all the router's lovely abilities are lost when I turn off it's DHCP. If anyone knows a better way to do this I'd like to hear it by the way :P

I could put linux on that machine but i'd rather not because most of my family would be in over their heads right away, but if it would be better than any software firewall (and would also protect all machines in the network) then I'll do it. Will this free linuxy hardware firewall do as good as, or better job, than a paid and dedicated software firewall on my mum's computer? Should I put some more effort into seeing if my router's firewall will work, even if it won't filter the connection from the source?

Iroh

The best advice I can give then is to teach your mother safe browsing habits, and how to at least check for malware and eliminate it. It's my belief that there is no good software firewall available.

You'll be going without "protection" from hackers, but I don't think it's off-base to say that hackers are not interested in individuals. Most people have their information stolen by trojans and the like that act passively in the background after you accidentally install them with some other program, not by hackers. They have bigger fish to fry.

Reiten

Comodo has a good rep and is free, although it can be a little intrusive with all it's warnings and when it asks for permissions.

Tav

Avast! or AVG are just as good as most paid for anti-vir's...and they're free. If you really want to buy an anti-virus, Kaspersky is meant to be pretty good.

embrik

SamuraiRock wrote: »

For hardware firewalls, I can't do one with a router because of my network setup. We can only get dialup (thanks Australia!) which means my internet can't come in through the router (unless I buy a dial up router which I don't want to do), so my router, which is a wireless/wired combo to serve our desktops and laptops, has DHCP turned off and our connection comes in from an XP SP2 machine which does the DHCP. If I use the routers' DHCP it interferes with Windows's Internet Sharing's DHCP and the network goes down. So if I got the hardware firewall in it going, the connection would still come in from the internet unhindered, but I don't think I can do that anyway since it seems that all the router's lovely abilities are lost when I turn off it's DHCP. If anyone knows a better way to do this I'd like to hear it by the way :P

I could put linux on that machine but i'd rather not because most of my family would be in over their heads right away, but if it would be better than any software firewall (and would also protect all machines in the network) then I'll do it. Will this free linuxy hardware firewall do as good as, or better job, than a paid and dedicated software firewall on my mum's computer? Should I put some more effort into seeing if my router's firewall will work, even if it won't filter the connection from the source?

Well, I know that Smoothwall works with most standard internal and external modems (just not "Softmodems"/"winmodems") It will take care of connecting to the ISP and doing the routing, dhcp & firewall work.

You then remote to the Smoothwall PC with a network-connected web browser, which will let you remotely bring the connection up/down, reboot/shutdown the unit, manage port forwarding, etc.

I don't recommend it if you're not willing to spend an hour or so setting it up, but little to no Linux knowledge is required to install it.