RE: [PCTECH] How to stop "phone-home" activity?

[Ken Sims <mdrg4136@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi John and the gang -

> Tiny Personal Firewall V2.  It's rather old and has a simple but
> effective interface & rule set.  IIRC it is what eventually became Kerio
> Personal FW.
>
> It was freeware.  V3 got bloated and wasn't free so I've stuck with V2
> for a few years.  You may be able to find a copy of it somewhere.  It
> should run on 98 and as it is very lightweight should run acceptably on
> a 233MHz CPU, although the slowest PC I ever ran it on was 800MHz.

Kerio Personal Firewall 2.1.5 is the latest version off the TPF version 2 
line.  It provides some significant enhancements over TPF 2, including raw 
socket detection.  It's old (but not as old as TPF 2) but still works 
fine.  It's available at http://www.kerio.com/dwn/kpf2-en-win.exe and is 
free for personal use.

TPF version 3 is bloatware.  KPF version 4 (they skipped version 3, I think 
so as not to confuse people with TPF 3) is also bloatware.  In both cases 
non-firewall functions  were added.  KPF 2 is just a firewall.  It does one 
thing and does it well rather than trying to be "all things to all people" 
and not doing a very good job of any of it.

KPF 2 is rules-based.  You do have to have some knowledge of internet 
protocols and ports to use it.  Any rule can be restricted to a specific 
program (which has a hash saved so that a change to the program can be 
detected).  So you could allow Mozilla to make outbound TCP connections to 
destination port 80 and block everything else to port 80, which would block 
anything that tries to phone home on port 80, unless the program has the 
capability to hijack Mozilla and make the connection through that 
program.  There are a lot of programs that can hijack IE that way.  There 
may be ones that can hijack other browsers but I'm not aware of them.

--
Ken
http://www.ke9nr.net/
Opinions expressed are my own and do not necessarily represent the views of 
my employer or anyone in their right mind.