Well, I finally installed XP !!! Lovely, Registered it, checked out a Government site, and whammo, Bloody SASSER! my ISP guy gave me a floppy to remove it, but BEWARE!!!!

Don't ever go online without a firewall!!!

I know we all know it, but the old "it'll never happen to me" paradigm is to be violently ignored.

Apart from that I'm V. happy tinkering away with XP :grinthumb

Depending on the ISP the average infection time for Sasser and Blaster may be as low as 30 seconds. Never install Windows on a network with no firewall at least until XP SP2 install CDs come out.

I was all happy about upgrading from -glances around nervously- M.E., registered online, looked at something before I'd added any Applications...

What can I say. Brain of a moth.

I just hope my warning stops someone else being complacent.
It's an Aussie thing, "She'll be 'right, mate"!:rolleyes:

Having a hardware router also helps (maybe I'm saying something silly, but well...).

I have one at home and almost all inbound traffic is not mapped to any LAN PC (via NAT). I guess that not allowing inbound connections on a specific port is enough to be protected from Sasser ... Right ?

I haven't gotten it, and I don't have a firewall, but I do have a hardware router.

A decent NAT/Firewall combo is a good thing to hide unpatched machines behind if you need to update things. Assuming said NAT machine is patched itself. Since you probably won't have forwarded all ports to the uninfected machine, you should be safe.

Hardware router/firewall is definately the best option. If only I could afford one...

One thing you are ALL overlooking here. There is no best of the three options, you should have all three. A router, software firewall, and AV software. If you don't, go get one. You should also keep your Windows updated. There is simply no excuse. I for one am quite tired of seeing hundreds of excuses every day about why people don't have their systems protected against such threats.

Its not like the old days when a bootsector virus just trashed your machine and we all laughed, these days viruses usually do two major things, they send themselves to all your friends(thought htey might not be friends for long) and they wait till its time to carry out a DoS attack.

No More Excuses!