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RE[2]: insecurity
by xaeropower on Mon 21st Jun 2010 18:32 UTC in reply to "RE: insecurity"
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"Sure beats most the Windows junk AV's"

I don't think that any antivirus company even consider clamav as a competitor or care to share samples with them this is the reason why their signature db is nowhere compared to the "junk avs" you mentioned. My experience is that clamav not just gets sigs for a certain malware later but it doesn't have a signature from 10/8 files.

"There are a lot of network based attacks that computers without firewalls are vulnerable to.
man in the middle attacks, spoofing, etc."

I don't see how firewall would help you in a MITM attack. There is a publicly available tool called ZXARPS which is able to intercept/change traffic between hosts in the same broadcast domain (eg between yout laptop and default gateway), try to defend your box against that with iptables ;)

"It also keeps ports that shouldn't be exposed to the internet away from the internet. "

The thing is that you are almost always behind a NAT device whether you using your laptop in a corporate network or just at home behind a dsl router but don't get me wrong having a firewall in situations where you for example have a samba server running on your laptop what you need to access when you are home is ok.
Using premade firewall rulesets however what the user in many cases don't understand and probably just an "input only" ruleset doesn't help much.

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