what firewall/antivirus?

[Aes]

what firewall/anti virus do you use?

i use:
firewall: sygate
anti virus: NOD32

[EcHoEs]

ESET Smart security.

[dejavu11]

No firewall, no virus protection

[Aes]

No firewall, no virus protection

mac? linux? mac has some viruses tho. not sure about linux. prob like 1 lol

[dejavu11]

mac? linux? mac has some viruses tho. not sure about linux. prob like 1 lol

Windows XP SP3, don't download silly things and you won't have an issue. Should you have to download something questionable run it through an online virus scanner.

I taught my father not to go click happy in FireFox and after about 2 years of usage it was time for a reformat on his machine, I decided to run a virus scan just to check things out with ClamWin and not one virus on the computer.

[Aes]

what about hackers? or what?
IMO takes to long to scan every file i download. although i never scan for viruses. maby once every 4months lol. you got me thinking.......

[dejavu11]

what about hackers? or what?
IMO takes to long to scan every file i download. although i never scan for viruses. maby once every 4months lol. you got me thinking.......

You think a hacker is going to magically get into your computer without a firewall? If you're that hard up for one every router comes with a firewall these days and window's default firewall works just fine. The truth of the matter is on the vast majority of your system installations (especially for desktop use) there's no need for a firewall.

A good virus scanner will automatically scan any new files that you download for you, so you shouldn't have to do it by hand. That said there's certainly nothing wrong with a virus scanner and a firewall on your machine; however, I believe if you're a knowledgeable user neither is required.

[Aes]

hmm might uninstall mine then. since i havnt got a virus or anything in about 2years. and i dont even use my things lol.
basicly all the things i donwload are addons for WoW. thats all lol.

[Dragon[Sky]]

You think a hacker is going to magically get into your computer without a firewall? If you're that hard up for one every router comes with a firewall these days and window's default firewall works just fine. The truth of the matter is on the vast majority of your system installations (especially for desktop use) there's no need for a firewall.

A good virus scanner will automatically scan any new files that you download for you, so you shouldn't have to do it by hand. That said there's certainly nothing wrong with a virus scanner and a firewall on your machine; however, I believe if you're a knowledgeable user neither is required.

I laughed.
So you're saying firewalls are useless?
You obviously have no idea what do firewalls even do.

Firewalls DON'T defend you from hackers, they monitor ingoing and outgoing traffic.
I dare call myself a knowledgeable user, and I was DDoSed a few months ago, half my connection was gone. You can't stop a DoS attack without a firewall. And I even had one running.

Thing is, if you think you're safe behind your monitor, then you're horribly wrong.
Firewalls do exist for a reason.
Even a router is not enough.

[Aes]

i kept my firewall. just not anti virus. C=

[Dragon[Sky]]

An antivirus is way more important for a casual user than firewalls.

[dejavu11]

I laughed.
So you're saying firewalls are useless?
You obviously have no idea what do firewalls even do.

Firewalls DON'T defend you from hackers, they monitor ingoing and outgoing traffic.
I dare call myself a knowledgeable user, and I was DDoSed a few months ago, half my connection was gone. You can't stop a DoS attack without a firewall. And I even had one running.

Thing is, if you think you're safe behind your monitor, then you're horribly wrong.
Firewalls do exist for a reason.
Even a router is not enough.

I'm well aware of what firewalls do, and I'm sorry to tell you that you can't stop DDoS with any software based firewall either. You can mitigate it to some extent, but it's not going to do that much for you. Now if you had a hardware based solution somewhere higher up on your upstream then you could talk, but as far as using one on your local machine software based they are not designed to mitigate DDoS to any great extent.

You have to first understand what a DDoS is and how it works. To give the super general explanation it's a distributed denial of service. Generally speaking data is simply sent at your machine faster then you can handle it.

What's the path of this data? Well it leaves it's origin, travels through the magical internet, and then proceeds through your ISP's upstream carriers and to your very house. Regardless of what hardware or software solutions you have running after your modem that bandwidth is still going to be coming at you (this is again assuming that your ISP isn't doing their own filtering which is outside of this discussion anyways).

Now the idea of closing the ports is a good one; however, this is still software based as far as this discussion goes. That means each packet must be read (at least to the packet portion) by your firewall and it is going to transverse to some extent down the TCP/IP stack. Blocking that port will cause the packet to automatically be dropped, but any DDoS worth it's weight is going to be coming in on an open port anyways. Pick any common port that is opened on your machine and that will be one an attacker would use against a desktop machine.

Now you may want to try and filter out the attack but once again:

1. This is a software firewall and as such you're still going to be reading the data on your machine to some extent and taking up your pipe to some extent.
2. Filtering through a distributed denial of service attack is a very difficult thing to actually do. Ask the people over at: DDoS Protection | DDoS Attack | DDoS Mitigation | Denial of Service Attacks about it and see if a software firewall is really going to do anything for you.

Above and beyond that:

1. The hacker remark was in response to a previous post.
2. How many desktop users get DDoS'ed on average?

[Aes]

An antivirus is way more important for a casual user than firewalls.

i never use my anti virus. nor does it ever block attacks. i never have attacks because all im ever doing is playing WoW. if im not on WoW im not on the computer.

[Dragon[Sky]]

I know very well what a DDoS attack is, and I was referring to DoS in general, like ICMP, SYN floods, SMURF attacks etc and I know how it works. And that's my point exactly, you can't save yourself with a firewall, let alone without it.
I was talking about you discouraging users from using firewalls and giving them a false sense of security.
Maybe the DDoS thing I mentioned was a little too far, you're right about that, casual users don't get attacked usually.
But you can't deny the fact that you can get attacked anywhere on the net. Some users have yet to realize that, or they just don't care.
Personally, I do care for my system alot, which is why I would rather go with the "better safe than sorry" variation.

[L'Lawliet]

switch to linux. you dont need any lol there are probably about 3 kind. but the word they can do is delete your home folder. if so just make a new account i saw your other thread read what i said about linux.