full-disclosure - Re: January 15 is Personal Firewall Day, help the cause

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From: brandon at rd.bbc.co.uk (Brandon Butterworth)
Subject: Re: January 15 is Personal Firewall Day, help the cause

> I just wanted to remind everybody that tomorrow is Personal Firewall Day.

Yuk.

Whilst I support people taking care of their security I rank personal
firewalls on the same level as virus detection

They don't fix the real problems and lead to a dependency culture of
constant upgrades (if people bother) and alternative vendor sales fud

Unwitting people pay money in good faith, believe they're now safe and
expose themselves to other attack vectors that bypass the firewall

The products sell on glossy features like reporting to users all the
things it saved them from - "someone tried to send you some packets
from their server on port 80, they must be trying to steal all your
files" creating pointless emails and wasting time explaining (which
they don't understand as it's a black box, it said attack so it must
have been)

I'd rather they spent the money with their ISP who hopefully has some
clued staff who will remind them when to patch and handle those that
don't when something attacks or hopefully before

I see vendors are getting into this now including products that deny
access from unclean machines (will this work?)

brandon