Security & DSL?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Pam
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Pam

Hoping someone can help me here - I am a new century tell DSL customer and
plan on hooking everything up this weekend - I talked to a rep at Century
Tell and they tell me that my XP Pro firewall is all that I need for
protection on their dsl.... I'm on dialup right now and I have xp pro
firewall turned on, and AVG (had to take of Zone Alarm cause AVG and it
didn't get along and kept running into email problems) ....

can someone tell me if I need anything other than the firewall and AVG when
I hook up my dsl?

thanks!

Pam
 
If you ask in the newsgroups relating to OE you will find that most MVPs
don't recommend using the email scanning oprion in AntiVirus programs at
all, I certainly don't in AVG but it applies to all of the other AV products
too.

If your version of ZA did popup blocking or mail filtering too this is
likely why they didn't get along.

I've used AVG and the Kerio Personal FW together with no problems.

The XP firewall doesn't spit out warnings like most of the others do, it
basically stops people finding services on your machine they shouldn't be
finding, but does less to stop malware from calling out. For example XP Pro
can run a webserver and an FTP server and unless you want them accessible to
the outside world the firewall can stop them being accessed, although of
course you won't be running them anyway in most cases. There might be a case
though if you want to run your website for creating pages but don't want the
world to have access.

I'd suggest that if you like the idea of zone alarm then try it without any
popup or email scanning options and keep the AVG without email scanning and
see what happens. If you do uninstall ZA follow their uninstall instructions
to the letter. Personally I prefer the format of Kerio but the XP FW should
be okay as your ISP suggested. A lot depends on user knowledge and not
running services "Just because they are available".

See what other people think. To some extent I think software personal
firewalls can be a false sense of security unless you have some
understanding.

Charlie
 
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