TechNet: Exploring the Windows Vista Firewall

New article up...

Back in the days of the paleocomputing era, no one ever thought about installing firewalls on individual computers. Who needed to? Hardly anyone had heard of the Internet, TCP/IP was nowhere in sight, and LAN protocols didn’t route beyond your building or campus. Important data lived on the mainframe or file servers—the information people kept on their desktop computers was rarely mission critical and the computer’s own weight afforded a certain amount of decent physical security. If there was a connection to the Internet available, there were likely some protocol translators in the way and a packet-filtering router (I mean "firewall") at the edge, probably configured with too many rules and exceptions.

Modern computing environments wildly diverge from those ancient times. Everything is connected to the Internet (and talks TCP/IP now) and portable devices are now the standard. Your employer has likely given you a laptop, not because they care about you, but because they care about getting more out of you—they fully expect you to work anytime you’ve got five spare minutes and a Wi-Fi connection. Laptops might cost more than desktops, but that investment is surely repaid in productivity. You see, it’s the portability that makes them so alluring—to you and your adversaries.

...continued: https://www.microsoft.com/technet/technetmag/issues/2007/06/VistaFirewall/default.aspx

Comments

• Anonymous
  January 01, 2003
  Customers have long requested a way to configure a computer to automatically disable its wireless NIC