Anonymous is right – while the AberNet firewall will do a great job (in fact, a perfect job) of protecting you from any inbound attack (although it doesn’t save you from e-mail borne viruses or web browser vulnerabilities, for example), your greatest risk comes from students on the network. And they don’t even have to be deliberately doing it!

If any of the students on the network connects to the internet at home, it’s quite possible for thier PC to still be carrying malicious code when it’s brought to Aber. And, here, there’s nothing to stop that code from then trying to attack other stunet computers – particularly ones on the same subdomain (e.g. PJM).

ZoneAlarm does a fantastic job of protecting Windows from these kinds of attacks. In the honeypot survey done, above, the machine with Windows XP and ZoneAlarm remained uninfected after two weeks of sitting there on the ‘net, inviting attack.

Vigilance.