for this
http://www22.verizon.com/home/utilities/security-backup
does it come with some sort of DoS protection as well? or just viruses and stuff?
@EvilMarvin wrote:for this
http://www22.verizon.com/home/utilities/security-backup
does it come with some sort of DoS protection as well? or just viruses and stuff?
It includes a Firewall, yes. As to Denial of Service attacks, that is very dependant on what is happening and what kind of attack it is. Some DoS attacks can only be beaten with time.
can it protect against UDP and SSYN Attacks? Is there any program i can use to monitor traffic?
If the attack is incoming and it's coming in as UDP, that's one thing. The most a firewall can typically do is drop the UDP traffic to keep it from affecting the application or device it's protecting past the Firewall. If it's SYN, a Firewall can stop things from going down in such an event as SYN attacks typically break applications by attempting to overwhelm the application with requests. Firewalls do this once again, by dropping traffic or actively refusing it.
A Firewall cannot fix connection saturation caused by a flood if the saturation is occurring at or before the Firewall, and a Firewall cannot fix slowness caused by a Firewall device or software being worked. It's there to protect resources on a machine from an attacker by dropping or actively refusing traffic for data security.
An Outgoing Firewall, something the Verizon Security Suite does have as well, can be used to stop traffic from your PC from leaving the PC. That's done the same way as it works on an incoming basis, so it is handy. Many can deny connections to botnets (usually when there's malware present that hasn't managed to disable the Firewall) or prevent File Sharing from accidentally being open to everyone else on the network. Certainly good to have for laptops which can be on any number of networks in it's lifetime.
In both directions, ports can be blocked from use, and with packet inspection, certain protocols can be blocked. Computer-based firewalls can block applications from being able to communicate outside of the machine, or even within the machine itself (this is sometimes handy).
Hopefully that explains a bit better on what they can and cannot do. I apologize for inaccuracies, it's late here.
For bandwidth monitoring, there are plenty of free programs you can use to monitor traffic. Windows has one built in called the Resource Monitor. OS X has the Activity Monitor, and Linux distributions vary with what they have but also have built-in programs. There are some nicer programs that come in the form of Sidebar gadgets and so on. These however, only measure traffic coming to/from your computer. For network-wide monitoring, you need a router (or switches, but ignore this parenthasis) capable of monitoring traffic on each network interface. The Verizon routers kind-of have this, if you're willing to do a small amount of math but other routers, especially those running DD-WRT have nice GUI interfaces that you can use to watch traffic.
how do i use firewall to drop or refuse attacks?
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