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Re: Windows malware and personal firewalls
(Cof) I think that link you posted was ‘scareware’ – more bogus spyware. I mean surely what you meant was Spybot search and destroy ? :)
An antivirus isn’t necessarily going to stop malware from running – it may stop 99% of it, but there is always a time lag between a new piece of malicious software coming out that doesn’t even match ‘heuristic’ virus signatures, and the anti-virus being updated to recognise it. Usually that delay is a few hours, in which a botnet can spread itself quite widely.
A firewall can stop some exploits, but it isn’t principally about stopping you from downloading and running something. What a personal firewall (like Comodo) can do is tell you in some detail what an unrecognised application is trying to do with with your network resources.