Cable Internet Access Security

What is the best way to protect yourself from Hackers when you have cable service. I have a call from a cust. who has downloaded from napster and now all his dll files are gone and he crashed. I fdisked reloaded win98 and am trying to figure out the best protection for him I have very little exp. with cable access. I was thinking firewall but which one??? He already uses McAfee online for virus protection so I am sure his dat's were up to date. Thanks in advance for any help and sugestions and is a firewall the best route to take?? :confused:

Had a similar situation with a friend's pc-- they got hacked BAD thru napster, even with a firewall. I do phone support for a local PC company, and i also got a call from someone that had the same thing happen...

check out this post....
http://forums.windrivers.com/cgi-bin...&f=17&t=004910

Thanks but I had already read that before I posted. I was looking for something more to the point of load and forget or whos firewall to use. There really aren't any mentioned besides zonealarm and gaurd dog but which is better or are there others not mentioned better??

After you post that, our network guy was walking by-- i had him read it--- he says taht with a software firewall, you are a lot more vulnerable-- he suggests a hardware firewall, but did not recomend a specific one...

I agree hw firewalls are by far the best, but for those who don't want to spend the extra $$ I recommend Tiny Personal Firewall. It's a nice little program and is free.

Well you do not say what OS this is but if it is Win98 all you should need to do is disable file and print sharing. Win98 does not have any listening services like ftp or telnet about the only thing listening is port 139. It could be that the guy downloaded a mp3 trojan from napster.

I am running win98 how much would a hardware firewall cost? and which one. If I am running windows 98 as long as I don't enable print and file sharing I can't get hacked?? I was almost positive that there are still ports open due to it being a cable modem with always on static ip address. Granted it is not on when the machine is off but otherwise I thought it would be due to that

In my opinion your customer needs both of following

Software: Zone Alarm
which you can get: here

Hardware: Linksys BEFSR11 EtherFast 1-Port Cable/DSL Router which you can get:
here

No home Cable/DSL system should be without.

However there is a virus that shows as an mp3 file (No firewall or virus protection), that when run deletes/renames all your mp3 files.