With some fiddling the firewall that ships with Vista, while ugly and poorly configurable compared to commercial software firewall products, can be made to do the job semi-well.
The mistake Microsoft made is to have the default option "Outbound connections that do not match a rule are allowed" for all versions of Vista. Basically meaning if there is a rule for a particular program to be blocked - then it will indeed be blocked, but every other program that does not have a rule will quite happily pump those outgoing packets.
You can configure the firewall to have both "Inbound connections that do not match a rule are blocked" and "Outbound connections that do not match a rule are blocked". Doing so will mean that everything is blocked unless you specifically add both an Inbound and Outbound rule to allow a program full Internet access.
It's always fun to fiddle, especially with rulesets
With some fiddling the firewall that ships with Vista, while ugly and poorly configurable compared to commercial software firewall products, can be made to do the job semi-well.
The mistake Microsoft made is to have the default option "Outbound connections that do not match a rule are allowed" for all versions of Vista. Basically meaning if there is a rule for a particular program to be blocked - then it will indeed be blocked, but every other program that does not have a rule will quite happily pump those outgoing packets.
You can configure the firewall to have both "Inbound connections that do not match a rule are blocked" and "Outbound connections that do not match a rule are blocked". Doing so will mean that everything is blocked unless you specifically add both an Inbound and Outbound rule to allow a program full Internet access.
It's always fun to fiddle, especially with rulesets
There is a small -free- app that help monitoring inbound and outbound connections for the default vista firewall: Vista Firewall Control. It is extremely limited but if you already have a hardware firewall (router) it can be enuff for some people.
I am currently using kaspersky Internet Security 6.0 and its integrated firewall, not that bad but i will switch for the free comodo one when it will be available for vista.
ha, I was just gunna recommend getting kaspersky 6.0 Internet Security. I haven't had an infection once so ever in the past couple months I've used it.
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