Routers and Firewalls

I just listened to Episode 3 of Security Now which finally convinced me Podcasts aren’t a waste of bandwidth. It makes a point I’ve been trying to make for a while now: that broadband routers can provide a lot of security (assuming reasonable configuration, i.e. UPnP and WAN Admin disabled) to a home computer/network. I have one from linksys, a BEFSR41. A few days ago, a friend of mine told me he that his firewall which was his old PC, slightly modified and runing SmoothWall has a problem – the power consumption is too high which means more money out of his pockets and into EDP‘s bottomless pockets every month. He also said that he didn’t want to connect to the internet without a firewall so I recommended a router like the one I have. I can’t remember if software firewalls were mentioned… probably. The point is, broadband routers are certainly worth considering. Personally I’d rather have my own custom firewall but initial cost (getting the hardware) and/or maintaining it (the power consumption) is too high.
Early last week I also installed a software firewall, the kerio personal firewall. I did this among a lot of other things after I became convinced that there was some sort of malware on my box. It turned out the malware was just a creation of my paranoia. I suspected malware mainly because Bitdefender found Trojan.Downloader.Vbs.Small.S in a temp file on my computer. To the best of my knowledge it was never executed. Neverthless, paranoia took over and I ended up wasting several hours.

Additional Links:
SysInternals – home of filemon, TCPView and more great windows utilities.
Ethereal – A Network Protocol Analyzer
WinDump – tcpdump for Windows
NAT Router Security Solutions
How To Keep Your Computer Spyware Free – Basic Windows Security

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