Until this weekend I’d never really seen a PC running Windows that was connected to the internet using a domestic broadband connection. The only Windows PC on my home network is hidden away behind a firewall provided by the ADSL router so no-one out there on the net even knows it exists.
This weekend I was at my parents’ house for the first time since they had broadband installed. They asked me to sort out a couple of small problems with their PC and I realised that at the same time I should probably install a virus checker and a firewall. The firewall I tried was from McAfee and one nice thing about it is that it gives an easy to read summary of the connections that it has denied. By the time I’d finished installing it, it showed that it had denied seven connection attempts. By the time I’d finished with the computer a couple of hours later, that number had grown to almost 160. Every 45 seconds or so, someone out on the internet was probing the PC for weaknesses.
I’ve seen stuff like this demonstrated on TV but this was the first time I’d seen it for myself. Any computer connected to the internet is constantly being probed by people who want to see if they can use it for nefarious purposes. You need to have some kind of protection. Please use a firewall.
(has anyone else just had a flashback to those 1985 government “use a condom” ads)