I'm clean

[Ron Nossaman]

>When all the fuss came about last night, I hurried to the computer store and 
>purchased Mcaffey Antivirus. Like my backup habits, I should have done this a 
>long time ago. I also purchased Mcaffey Firewall which I highly recommend. 
>Keeps outsiders out of your computer system.
>
>Dave Peake, RPT


Tip of the iceberg, folks, especially, but not exclusively, for the cable
cruiser set. I've been using Black Ice Defender as a firewall for some
time, and it's very effective at blocking incoming traffic, but we all
still need something to monitor and control outbound traffic as well. I
downloaded PKZip from the Web site, to get a decent Windows based zip
manager. The non-retail version of this program (don't know about the
retail version) includes a cute little unannounced worm called Tsadbot that
forever more runs in the background and communicates with SOMETHING out
there in cyberland whenever your computer is running. The idea, I think, is
that this little gargoyle is assembling, and presumably disseminating, a
compilation of your Net trafficking habits (and possibly (probably))
installed software list, for a user profile database to be sold to other
vendors as a marketing tool. In truth, it could be sending ANYTHING off
your hard drive to ANYONE out there and you wouldn't know the difference.
Zone Alarm will control traffic in both directions, but I can't get it to
work for some reason. Can't access the thing once it's installed to
configure it, but it did tell me what was happening when it detected
outbound traffic. PKZip, interestingly enough, will not run without it's
parasite. 

Quite a few vendors offering shareware or freeware versions of their
commercial software are using this thing, so if you use any shareware
products from prominent companies, you may have it. Decide for yourself
whether it's important enough to be concerned about. 

Now, does anyone know of a good firewall that DOES monitor and
report/control outbound traffic as well as inbound?

Ron N