Personal firewalls are 'futile'

Just like anti virus programs we need firewalls even so hard.

Online your a sitting duck for hacker and scriptkiddies who enter your pc in no time if you didnt protect your pc but as you can read in the following article not even a firewall is 100% save.

Security researchers have highlighted a potential shortcoming with personal firewall products.

To alert users of the presence of a Trojan or privacy threatening program running on their systems, personal firewalls have been adapted so they monitor and block outbound traffic (as well as blocking inbound network traffic).

If a malicious program becomes active a user will be alerted and the application will be blocked by a personal firewall (unless a user is daft enough to agree that it should be able to access the Internet, of course).

This would normally stop a Trojan sending out data (which might be your passwords) disguised as HTTP traffic on port 80.

However if a malicious program modifies a DLL used by Internet Explorer to make an outbound connections to port 80 on its behalf then this protection is bypassed.

Security researcher Robin Keir, has developed a proof-of-concept tool, called FireHole, which illustrates how the trick can fool personal firewalls (such as Zone Alarm, Norton Personal Firewall and Black Ice Defender).

Read the full article Here

Source: TheRegister

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