New Computer? Six Steps to Safer Surfing

Sun Dec 19 23:26:42 UTC 2004

On Sun, 19 Dec 2004 17:47:28 -0500 (EST), Sean Donelan <sean at donelan.com> wrote:
> There is a lot of wishful thinking, but security people seem to be
> very bad about actually testing their theories to see if they are
> effective.  A lot of snake-oil gets sold using the theory it can't hurt.
> 
> Many Home/SOHO PC's are self-infected by the owners.  Network firewalls
> and anti-virus software are very poor at preventing that.  The really
> scary thing is the infection rate of Home/SOHO computers with
> AV/firewalls is higher than "naked" computers.

er, so having no firewall or antivirus software on your home broadband
connection with an XP box hooked onto it would be just as safe as an
XP box having $software_fw and frontended by $hw_firewall that at
least does NAT and a bit of packet filtering on the side?

I'd be interested in seeing the study you're quoting ..

thanks
--srs
-- 
Suresh Ramasubramanian (ops.lists at gmail.com)