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Understand Windows Vista Firewall for Full Utilization

by Milo on November 15th, 2007

Windows Vista Firewall should work fine for above average users given that they understand how it works and is able to make the necessary configurations to ensure that the Firewall perform at its full potential.

Windows Vista firewall allows all outgoing traffic by default and treats your PC malware free. To be able to make the firewall function well, a user should be able to filter all outgoing requests and identify which ones are valid and those that are not.

Configuring Vista firewall is not going to be easy for most users and it is better to understand how Windows Vista Firewall works. Having said that, go ahead and read the whitepaper written by SANS Institute.

In an excerpt:

The Firewall

What is provided by Microsoft is a basic, simple, old fashion, traditional packet blocking, port
based firewall. Like many third party firewall solutions, Microsoft now allows rule creation based
on application, port, interface and IP Address based rules. For example one can create a rule to
restrict access by IP Address and port to a service:
allow inbound from 192.168.0.0/32 TCP port 800 to
C:\cygwin\user\sbin\sshd.exe
There is little in the area of packet inspection, although it does recognize various protocols for
example IGMP, GRE, and ESP.

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