Attached Link: http://isc.sans.org

> Quote - *(a virus scanner and a personal firewall may help, but is not enough to make a Windows PC save). > > * > one comment. > > > Bovine Excrement. > * > *

Actually, most security sites (like the one linked above) will do comparisons among A/V suites as each new virus comes down the pike. It's kind of alarming how many of them don't catch the nasties... A Windows PC (or a Mac, or Linux PC) is never, ever perfectly safe with just A/V and software firewall. OSX and Linux are damned close to it, but no OS is perfect. None. I work with security issues professionally, and out of the hundreds of machines, scads of firewalls(software, real, and otherwise), and a metric ton of corporate security policy and procedures, I can tell you that I still see about one infected Windows machine per month, just off the corporate LAN. Most of them are IFRAME-injected exploits. The IP addy blocks and domain at my work is a bit popular with the cracker set. From personal experience, I have seen and demonstrated the following: A Windows box exposed to the public Internet (w/ no corporate security between it and World) will be taken over before you even get the first round of patches downloaded. A default Linux install with default security (and unpatched), will likely be compromised in a couple of days, unless you use a hardened distro. Macs and FreeBSD are about the only OSes that will last as default for more than a week, assuming someone doesn't brute-force their way in. Here's the trick - unless you are monitoring the network connection, you probably don't know you're infected. A smart bot-herder won't overload your box, and instead your zombified box will, for instance, send out only a few spams a minute (and not thousands per second). Multiply yours with the rest of a typical botnet (about 20k-40k), and you get a hefty outbound blast that looks just like normal traffic. /P