Firewalls, Anti-virus or Just IPtables?
Personal hygiene defends from bugs, or better said proper, complete and sustained hygiene as a practice gives best results in keeping bugs away. From our body to the house habitat, then out on the streets, and so on and so forth. It’s a chore that runs from combating dust mites to clearing airports. And it gets a pretty neat feeling if applied diligently. Yet bad eating habits correlated with harmful synthetic soaps would give a false sense of security, lowering our guard and turning us into believing we’re on the right path while we’re heading down the abyss.
Same goes for our inter-networked computing machines. Personal firewalls are not exactly the ‘air-bag’ solution for your computer; and I’d suggest not even the best rated anti-virus programs… Why? Because so far the software platform —aka. the operating system, OS— springs from a decade+ long overbloated monolithic core and has an open default for inbound/outbound data transfers, it cannot secure a measurable barrier between what’s inside and what’s outside. It’s like trying to patch the atmosphere, it won’t work.
The option is you switch to another sort of platform (OS), one that has a slim kernel architecture, runs independent processes, clearly separates the root from the userland, grants read/write/execute access based only on a matrix of permissions for three distinct levels (owner, group, others) and does yet a ton of intricate scalable things, unnerving enough to deter automatic malicious scripts from nesting, spreading and calling back home with gold valuable stolen data.
It pretty much looks similar to real world property protection. Just do the parallel in your mind and then you get the picture. Once you’re OK with this, then you’re ready to accept a bit of thinking different on a Mac or —if tight the budget— deal with the Linux learning curve. Times are good to switch since the GUIs (graphic user interfaces) grew so really cute on every platform — Linux, mind you, because the Mac was the cutest since 1984.
Bottom line: Macs and Linux PCs give you almost military grade security levels on your personal computer, desktop, laptop, workstation. IPtables and the functional architecture of the platform’s core make the difference. Firewalls, anti-virus and the patch get the backseat of dusting memories, and forgotten worries.
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