Personal Firewalls

If you are running a 'personal firewall' such as ZoneAlarm or BlackIce Defender, please read the following very carefully

Normal traffic

There is a huge amount of background traffic on the internet. The majority of the alerts your personal firewall shows are normal background traffic. Nothing to worry about, nothing to notify anyone else of, nothing worth investigating.

Worms attacking IIS webservers

There are a number of worms that try and infect machines on the 'net. If you're running a Windows machine and not running IIS you have nothing to worry about. One thing that means is that if your personal firewall tells you that you have attempts to connect on port 80 it may well be traffic from one of these worms. Don't worry about it. Don't notify anyone about it.

'Alerts' are not something to worry about

If your personal firewall pops up an alert, there is never any reason to worry about it. Never, ever, notify an abuse desk about it. It merely wastes their time, and yours.

Don't let your personal firewall alarm you

And finally, most personal firewalls are snake oil, intended to separate money from those who don't understand the issues involved. That means that they will alert you about perfectly normal network traffic, even though there is absolutely no need to do so, in order to encourage you to upgrade or pay for 'Pro' versions.