[Techtalk] Personal firewalls: helpful?

[Gebhard Dettmar]

On Tuesday 07 June 2005 10:19, Conor Daly wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 06, 2005 at 10:25:09AM +0100 or thereabouts, Dan wrote:
> > [...]
>
> The one thing about MS Windows firewalls is that, more than likely, a
> home user is running with full privileges (even on XP) and so, a virus
Well, especially on XP (I mean XP home) On Win2k and XP prof you have ACLs 
(Access Controll Lists), which allow you to get all the privileges that 
you need (like stopping printer jobs or installing fonts. Some Apps like 
StarOffice or PGP also require full priviliges] and saves you from the 
ones a normal user just shouldn't have. On XP Home you have this 
opportunity only in safe mode and it takes some weird registry hack to 
enable it for normal startup. So I can understand every home user running 
full privileges on XP Home
> will be able (if it knows how) to switch off the personal firewall for
> its own purposes.
But worms like blaster come through running system-services. those have 
System- privileges, which is even more than the Windows-Admin has. And it 
doesn't matter how priviliged or unpriviliged the user is.
> Conor
regards
Gebhard