Personal firewalls and related tools

Part 1:

Preparation: Install a firewall that you already know or use your own OS firewall tool. There are many firewalls freely available. The article ‘Personal Firewall Reviews' (Markus, 2013) provides some examples and ideas. The whole group should not use the same personal firewall. Discuss each individual member's choice of the personal firewall and provide some justification for the decision. Test the personal firewalls you each selected with an invited attack. You can then visit a Web site that will perform a controlled invited attack, for example, the Gibson Research Corporation (2014).

Create a report: Briefly summarise what personal firewalls can do and what they cannot do to protect your personal computer. Present one potential benefit that you get from installing a personal firewall; something that you cannot do without it. Report your findings from the invited attack on your firewalls. Distinguish between the function of a personal firewall and that of antivirus software, anti-spyware software and their relationship to personal firewalls.

Part 2:

Preparation: Download and install any security-related tools package. Some possible examples include (but you are not limited to):
Microsoft Windows Sysinternals site (Microsoft, 2014)

Fport for Windows from the McAfee site (McAfee, 2014)

Lsof for Linux from the Free(code) site (Abell, 2013)

Other tools from the CHIHT site (ENISA, 2014, see the proactive tools section)

Create a report: Describe your experience working with your chosen security-related tools. Analyse which aspects of the tools will be useful for security purposes for experts and for normal users. Submit your report (both Part 1 and Part 2) to the Turnitin link by the end of Week 6.

References:

Abell, V. (2013) Lsof [Online]. Available from: https://people.freebsd.org/~abe/

ENISA. (2014) Clearinghouse for incident handling tools [Online]. Available from:

http://www.enisa.europa.eu/activities/cert/support/chiht

Gibson Research Corporation. (2014) Welcome to ShieldsUP! [Online].

https://www.grc.com/x/ne.dll?bh0bkyd2

Markus, H.S. (2013) 'Personal firewall reviews', Home PC Firewall Guide [Online].

http://www.firewallguide.com/software.htm

McAfee. (2014) Fport v2.0 [Online]. Available from:

http://www.mcafee.com/us/downloads/free-tools/fport.aspx

Microsoft (2014) Sysinternals security utilities [Online]. Available from:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/25e27bed-b251-4af4-b30a-c2a2a93a80d9.aspx