Windows Personal Firewall Analysis

**houseisland** · November 11th, 2007, 05:34 PM

Looking for a firewall for a W2K machine, I found this:

http://www.matousec.com/projects/win...ewalls-ratings

Interesting.

____________________________________________

It is my pure and virtuous heart that
gives me the strength of ten!

**NooNoo** · November 12th, 2007, 06:08 AM

Interesting that a freebie is the best...

**houseisland** · November 12th, 2007, 11:16 AM

Originally Posted by NooNoo

Interesting that a freebie is the best...

Yes, a ranking that it shares with a pay item -- same score.

I looked at the best and then chose the second best -- a much smaller app with a smaller footprint -- better for an old PIII laptop.

I tried downloading their collection of test tools, but as soon as I tried to upzip the file my PCCillan seized most of them as dangerous hacker tools.

Oh well....

____________________________________________

It is my pure and virtuous heart that
gives me the strength of ten!

**NooNoo** · November 13th, 2007, 04:22 AM

u r so 133t

**houseisland** · November 13th, 2007, 11:30 AM

Originally Posted by NooNoo

u r so 133t

Aww.. shucks, NooNoo. You do say the sweetest things.

___________________________________________

It is my pure and virtuous heart that
gives me the strength of ten!

**techbug157** · March 16th, 2012, 10:55 AM

Never saw a firewall analysis before. Thanks, this information is really helpful

**Dude111** · March 23rd, 2012, 03:45 AM

I have seen that page before and its interesting but NOT SURPRISING that all the "free" stuff does ALOT BETTER than the paid software!

**slgrieb** · March 23rd, 2012, 04:08 PM

Actually, Matousec is a 3rd rate company that largely relies on self-promotion to generate business. Their firewall testing methodology is fatally flawed, and since they potentially obtain revenue by testing products they review, that's just another nail in the coffin for their credibility.

The best analysis of Matousec's methodology is found here. Can we have a show of hands for those who remember the Kobe worm? Yeah, I didn't think there'd be many, since it wasn't a memorable threat except in the opinion of Matousec. According to Matousec, Kobe (sometimes known as Earthquake) could bypass all conventional AV software. The End of the World was nigh! Fortunately, Matousec had a product that would block Kobe. Other AV publishers either dismissed the threat as unrealistic, already incorporated methodologies to prevent the exploit, or both.

Of course it turned out that all other AV vendors (all other meaning everyone but Matousec) was correct. The threat was essentially non-existent. See one of the points that Matousec failed to mention in their description of this deadly worm was that introducing it into a system required direct physical access to the computer, and an administrative account. It couldn't be executed remotely; somebody had to sit down and run it. Given those constraints, it was possible that Kobe could bypass many AV programs, but in practice it was a total non-event.

**Niclo Iste** · March 23rd, 2012, 04:27 PM

Well in their defense it does sound deadly. If the virus writer was hell bent on infecting your machine he might kill you in the struggle after forcing himself into your home/office and then attempthing to get on your computer. It's quite the threat. I'm not sure though how useful a firewall is at that point regardless of who makes it, unless that firewall was made by S&W, Glock, Mossberg, etc. and happened to be fully loaded and in your hands at the time of the invasion.

**NooNoo** · March 23rd, 2012, 07:48 PM

I remember a joke email I got once

"We are very poor techno terrorists, so we would be grateful if you would delete something important on your machine and then tell everyone you were hacked by us"

Or something like that... made me chuckle.

**slgrieb** · March 23rd, 2012, 09:30 PM

Two years later, it's almost impossible to find online info about Kobe. If you do a general search with Bing or Google, you just aren't going to get a relevant hit. However, if you do a search on, say, eweek.com, you can get a little more info: http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Security/Wi...s-Find-502218/

It's already forgotten, but Matousec's bogus alert generated reams of commentary in 2010. Now, if you go to Matousec's site and do a search for Kobe, you get dumped into some crappy search engine that does an Internet search without searching Matousec.com at all. Yeah, that inspires confidence in Matousec's integrity. Heck! I didn't even know there was a search site called Wee-B-Hos.com.

Frankly, I was hoping that I might generate a response from either R2D2 or C-threepio, and actually discuss Matousec's firewall tests. oh well. I'll get back to the topic later.