Firewalls, Kerio vs Windows own.

tomstickland

I always believe that stand alone firewalls provided more protection than the windows built in job.
However

One thing, just to be fair:

Kerio, or to be specific, Kerio Personal Firewall 4.1.2 was the least
bad software in our test (I'd not call it the best one, because also
Kerio had no real advantages over the Windows-Firewall). Even Tiny is
worse.

Kerio only has small design flaws like the fact that it is opening
sockets with listen() on 0.0.0.0 itself, and filtering away afterwards,
Kerio is easy to switch off from a malware in the standard configuration
and Kerio installs extra code onto your system, so theoretically the
system has more code which could be object of an unseen attack vector.

The Witty worm was a real-world example, how sometimes such theoretical
flaws cause practical problems:

http://sophos.com/virusinfo/analyses/w32wittya.html

So Kerio is the only firewall in our test, which I would judge with:
"does not lower security considerably compared to the Windows-Firewall".

http://www.unixadmintalk.com/f55/kerio-personal-firewall-4-nips-86824/


Any idea what "BAD-TRAFFIC IP Proto 103 PIM" is about. I've googled it and there's a few clues, but most seem to say it's a near-meaningless error in their experience.

Browntoa

I would not rely on XP's firewall...personally

and I've no idea what that means either !!

Kerio has always passed all the leak tests on www.grc.com

Woby_Tide

this info does sort of fly in the face of all other opinions of the windows firewall, the lack of blocking unknown outbound traffic is enough for me

alanrowell

Based on that there's one conclusion - if their products are anything like their review then don't buy anything from Sophos