On 2/4/11 2:34 PM, R A Lichtensteiger wrote:
david raistrick wrote:
Everyone doesn't suddenly get "owned" because there isn't a external firewall. Modern OS's default to secure.
We clearly live and work in different worlds. Not to mention that "we" are not the average consumers anymore. We were, in the days before NAT (and SPI).
A quick mental review of my relatives indicates more than a few of them with a PC jacked into a cable modem. The only firewall is the one that comes with Windows.
Sure, pretty much every company and +some+ residential service has a firewall fo some sort in place, but they aren't the automatic default that you are assuming. As you say, "live and work in different worlds."
Bearing in mind that modst of the computers being sold today are laptops they do not sit inside the home cowering behind the firewall they are routinely attached to all sorts of potentially hositile environments, campus networks, offices, starbucks, airplanes etc and the only security perimeter they can count on is the one established inside the network interface rather than outside of it. this mac while a little more widely traveled than most has 500+ wireless networks which it remembers. making assumptions abou the security of the nework outside your machine or expectations for it is extremely dangerous. mMving into the future a larger percentage of the devices are or are going to be network agile and the upshot is a rather different take on what constitutes a security domain.
Reto