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Pastimes : Dream Machine ( Build your own PC ) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Rick Faurot who wrote (13494)	7/17/2002 2:30:23 PM
From: Jon Tara	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 14778

A NAT firewall will prevent ANY inbound access, other than that which you specifically enable. ZoneAlarm is still very useful in this situation, though, because it can prevent "trojan horse" programs from sending data out over the Internet. This kind of protection can ONLY be performed on your computer(s). It cannot be done externally (as in an external firewall). An external firewall can prevent outbound traffic other than that specifically permitted. So, you can prevent protocols or points of contact that you do not want. But, as a practical matter, you need to enable outbound HTTP to any site. Any good trojan-horse writer is going to know that, and likely to use HTTP to deliver the goods. ZoneAlarm does require quite a bit of vigilence and knowledge on the part of the user, though. It pops-up the first time an application attempts to make an outbound connection, and asks your permission. It then remembers that that application has your permission to use the specificied protocol and port. Problem is, it is not easy to distinguish legitimate applications from illegitimate ones. Oh, some are obvious - it will say that Netscape is trying to access the Internet. Fine and dandy - let er' rip! What do you do when it says that gerflumpnitz.dll is trying to access the Internet? Is it a trojan horse, or a component used by Norton Anti-Virus, or some other application that you have installed and want to allow to access the Internet? Or is it a component of an application that you have installed, and DON'T want to allow to access the Internet? (i.e. you would rather it didn't "phone home".) I haven't used ZA for a while, because of this. Maybe they have improved their documentation, and provided an extensive list of common programs and components. Again, the biggest problem is that the names of the applications and DLLs that pop up are not necessarily obvious, and it can take some degree of head-scratching to figure out what they are and whether or not you want to permit access. It is not at all obvious.