silverblade33 opened this issue on Jul 04, 2009 · 47 posts
ShawnDriscoll posted Tue, 07 July 2009 at 3:11 AM
Everyone (and that means everyone) needs a hardware firewall between their computer and their Internet connection. Software firewalls just won't do. This prevents infected computers on the Internet from infecting yours just by having your computer turned on. Anti-virus programs try their best to prevent you from accidently downloading or executing a virus on your computer. Some anti-virus programs can halt a virus, but not remove or quarrantine it. And some anti-virus programs can remove bits of virus code left on your hard drive that another anti-virus program managed to halt.
I've seen people run two anti-virus and two firewall programs on their computer (slowy of course) without them knowing their system is that way. And it's infected. Those are the kinds of computers that are connected to the Internet trying to infect anything that it can ping that's not behind a real firewall.
Of course, a firewall acts as a simple switch if the computer behind it is infected. It will try to infect other computers on your LAN and anything on the other side of the firewall (on the Internet).