Hey! I just wanted to know wich firewall do you guys recommend. Because my dad thinks that someone hacked his computer. He didn't download anything, and never accepted a file, and now his system32 folder is gone. or thats atleast what the computer is saying on windows startup. So can anyone please give me a name for a very hacker secure firewall? Thanks

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Actualy, most (free) firewalls are more or less hack secure, so simply installing one of them and configuring it correctly should be enough to make it a lot harder for a hacker to access your pc.
The loss of the system32 folder could also be due to a virus or some kind of mallware, so I recommend you to also install a virusscanner.

Ps. I'm happy with Comodo Firewall Pro (it's free) and Avast Anti-virus (free also)

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For Windows, I use the firewall delivered with the McAfee 2007 security suite. And I am satisfied with it.
Unfortunately, it's not free.

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I personally use two different kinds of firewalls, hardware and software. My opinion is that the hardware firewall is more important and effective. I am currently using a Sonicwall small business firewall/router but any consumer NAT router should work well. The key is the NAT (network address translation) routing which puts all of your computers behind the router on their own subnet such as 192.168.x.x. In this case the 192.168.x.x address range is not Internet routable and no information can be directly transferred from the Internet to your computer. In order for a request to be seen by your inside computer, the Internet computer must use the public IP assigned to the router. After that the router analyses the packet to see what port it is and if any rules have been added for port forwarding. If so the packet is passed into the internal network and if not it goes to the great bit bucket in the sky. Just by having a NAT firewall router you can cut your attack area by about 99% for unsolicited attacks.

I also run a software firewall on my internal machines. On all of them except one I only have the standard XP SP2 firewall and on the other I have the free version of Zone Alarm. The software firewall only adds minimal protection from any computers brought into the internal network that may already be infected. It also allows you to control any outbound communications. This way you can make that even if a rouge programs gets into your computer, you have to give it permission before it can talk to the outside world. (The above case goes from XP SP2 because by default Vista does filter outbound traffic in addition to inbound traffic.)

If your father is fairly confident that he did not let anything nasty onto his system I would suspect that it is actually a hardware failure. I have seen many, many hard drives over the years develop bad sectors and sometimes they happen in a critical Windows file. When this happens the computer simply will not boot and can even say that the System32 folder could not be found. My suggestion would be to boot into the recovery console and run chkdsk. If chkdsk does not find anything then you may want to get a utility more advanced such as Spinrite. While you are at it you should scan for viruses with a scanner that boots from CD and not from within Windows. Just make sure the definition database is up to date.

 

 

 

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I'm also pretty convinced that a firewall cannot prevent the system32 folder from disappearing.
I think that this folder disappeared because it has been removed by a human clickin the "delete" button, or by a disk failure.
This leads me to another important topic.
As soon as you wil have finished re-installing your father's PC, when everything will be working correctly, you should do a full system backup, the best way is performing a ghost image on your USB disk, further you will put this backup on a DVD in order to be able to do a fast restore in case of new crash.

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I don't think its that easy to just 'delete' the system32 folder! anyway, my suggestion is to try and restore the files using System File Checker.

Firstly, get a copy of your OS CD, and put it into your computer. Then, open command prompt (Start > Run > "cmd" > Enter) and type in "sfc /scannow"
This will attempt to restore all the system files from the CD, back to your computer.

Whats the exact message when the computer starts up? Is it during the boot or after he's logged in? As for your first question, I use Comodo Firewall also. Once you get past the popup's and it becomes accustomed to your computer and the software, it works well.

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Although Comodo is pretty good and makes for a secure firewall, the I personally prefer Zone-Alarm from Zone labs. ZA seems to be a little less obtrusive while running, yet blocks the attacks and passes all security tests that I've seen run on it. I do consulting for a living and ZA is my first choice when recommending a free or inexpensive firewall. Don't be fooled by PC-Tools firewall, which resembles ZA very closely, it is no where near as good in testing.

Many people will say they have a hardware firwall, as they're using a router, however most of the consumer grade devices only provide NAT protection and are not a true bi-directional firewall. I still recommend backing it up with a software solution on the individual PC for absolute protection.

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I use comodo free it's pretty awesome and it has all features that you would ever need and it don't cost a dime tho it kinda logs at start up.

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Yeah, I;m also using Comodo Free Firewall it is is working well for me, also. I would recommend it. In the past I have used Zone Alarm since it came with my Dell. It served me well and had about the same features as Comodo, however, it would annoy me as it always asked for me to pay for a newer version and upgrade (It's not free).

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I am currently using the Symantec Client Firewall on my desktop, which comes as part of the Symantec Client Security package (for businesses and enterprises). I would not suggest this version (since it is expensive) but rather the retail consumer versions, Norton Internet Security 2008 which also includes a firewall.

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