isitreal - 3:30 pm on Jul 1, 2004 (gmt 0)

Why MS even bothered putting in their 'firewall' is beyond me. It only blocks incoming traffic, which your router should do anyway, and much better. Leaving any outgoing stuff unblocked, which means all those trojans will be free to phone home with no problems at all. Here's a quick review of it [brienposey.com], not the best site, but seems to have been done by somebody who knows reasonably well how to do testing...

This means now you will have to go in, disable the XP 'firewall', then install a real firewall, one added step to securing your PC.

seriously contemplating a corpwide netscape browser switch

Don't do that, do a corpwide Firefox switch, then your uses will actually be reasonably happy. Thunderbird isn't ready for prime time yet from what I've seen, still on version 0.7 so I'd wait to switch that until they get some of its bugs worked out. If you install the 'all-in-one-mousegestures' extension, not only will all your users become completely addicted to non IE browsers, your network will be safer, for this recent wave of exploits, and for the waves of exploits to come.

Just because MS claims this newest service pack will resolve security problems doesn't mean that it will resolve security problems, they said that last year too with their 'secure computing' thing. Just give people some time and they'll find the holes, I have faith in that if in nothing else... IIS was 'completely revamped' too, version 4 or 5, can't remember, that's teh version that was exploited in the recent 'footer' method... MS is counting on a lack of memory I think, seems to be working.