Problem Firewalls

Oh man! Ad-blocking software has been detected! :'(

This website is run by the community, for the community... and it needs advertisements in order to keep running. Blocking our ads means your killing our stats!
Please disable your ad-block, or become a premium member to hide all advertisements and this notice.

Hello,

I would be interested to hear best practice for enabling firewalls.

Most home computer networks now have a Windows software firewall, anti-virus software security firewall and a hardware router firewall. Presumably, only one firewall should be enabled? If so, which is the most effective?

Many thanks,
Mark

 

Oh man! Ad-blocking software has been detected! :'(

This website is run by the community, for the community... and it needs advertisements in order to keep running. Blocking our ads means your killing our stats!
Please disable your ad-block, or become a premium member to hide all advertisements and this notice.

Generally you only have one software firewall and one AV on a machine. They tend to fight with each other otherwise, particularly active monitoring/scanning AV products.

In reality home broadband users will get basic protection from NAT in their router.

SOHO router firewalls tend to be a bit basic, basically you can lock down ports, and IP ranges. There is probably some benefit to filter at both levels. Firstly the router will give some protection to all devices on network, and secondly the software approach can have more knowledge of applications and protocols and perform more active filtering.