No Sygate - What Now??

[darrent]

I've always used Sygate Firewall Pro but when I tried to buy a new copy for another laptop it seems it's not available anymore - I get pushed to buy Norton.

I'm assuming one or the other has been taken over but I have Norton products - any good alternatives to Sygate out there that are router friendly i.e. will not require any messing about with ports and such!!!???

[mattley]

XP SP2 built in firewall is perfectly adequate. True it doesn't block outgoing traffic, so won't help if you're already infected or activly download a trojan but on a clean well managed machine with a carefull user, unless you need special features, there really isn't any need for a third oparty firewall.

As mentioned on the other thread, a hardware firewall is really the best option as putting a firewall on the machine youre trying to protect is really a bit redundant. Hackers are now looking for vulns in the firewall products themselves, which Norton, Kerio and Black ice users have all found out to their cost over the last few years.

[chris watton]

Doesn't the router come with it's own firewall? I too went through the same, loved the Sygate program, very easy to configure and totally unobtrusive, unlike 99.9% of other firewall software. I decided to just use the router firewall, and have had not one problem for over 8 months of always on internet!

[GreenV8S]

mattley said:

XP SP2 built in firewall is perfectly adequate. True it doesn't block outgoing traffic, so won't help if you're already infected or activly download a trojan but on a clean well managed machine with a carefull user, unless you need special features, there really isn't any need for a third oparty firewall.

The XP SP2 built in firewall is about as much use as a chocolate fire guard. The main reason for having a soft firewall locally on the client is to stop spyware from getting out onto the net. Hardware firewalls aren't much help for that.

[Plotloss]

GreenV8S said:

Hardware firewalls aren't much help for that.

You can configure them to block outbound traffic as well and if it supports uPnP it will autoconfigure.

Addmittedly it is a bit of a fag as if the spyware is a has upnp discovery it will get out in this scenario but its still all round the best defence.

[GreenV8S]

Plotloss said:

You can configure them to block outbound traffic as well and if it supports uPnP it will autoconfigure.

Maybe I'm behind the times, but I regard uPnP as an obviously and spectactularly foolish idea and it should be the first thing you turn off if you have *any* interest in securing your machine.

[Plotloss]

Mixed bag like anything, upsides and downsides.

If a uPnP aware program opens the port then its down to the robustness of what is listening on that port. If what is listening is tightly coded then it shouldnt be an issue, if its easily compromised then obviously it is.

[darrent]

Hard f/w is well and good but I use quite a lot of wireless networks when travelling so I'm assuming a soft f/w is the best option for this??!?