[Techtalk] Personal firewalls: helpful?

[Listpig]

I can see two major uses to a personal firewall, above and beyond having a
network firewall:

1) A network firewall isn't going to protect you from machines *inside* the
network.  If your network is at home, presumably you trust the machines and
users you share the network with.  I don't worry about firewalling my
desktop at home; I know the network firewall is good and I know who else is
on that network.

 If it's not at home (school, work), then you have to consider the
competence of the folks in charge of the firewall and the folks you share
the network with.  I work at a college with a moderately incompetent network
staff and crappy security on the student-accessible computers in the
library.  (They can wander all over the network with no problem.)  Yeah, I
firewall my machine on that network.

2) Laptops: do you wander about connecting to the occasional WiFi network
you don't really know anything about?  You probably want to  be running a
firewaill on your machine.

All three of the machines that I use in those contexts are Macs running OS X
(BSD, essentially), so it's not an issue of Windows vulnerability, but I
still don't want unknown folks wandering about inside my machine.

--pig


On 6/6/05 04:25, "Dan" <dan at cellectivity.com> wrote:

> I've heard of Windows users running personal firewalls (i.e.,
> implemented in software). I don't have to worry about that because I
> don't run Windows, but I do wonder whether these personal firewalls do
> any good. Obviously they're not as good as a dedicated machine, but I
> assume they still provide some protection.
> 
> Does anyone know what kind of attacks personal firewalls protect against
> (and what kind of attacks they don't)?