Drive-By Install -- Does a Firewall Help Prevent?

[Guest]

[larrymcg]

My first post on this forum.  I use WinXP SP2 fully patched with Firefox 2.0.0.14 and avast! 4.8 Home edition.
I am behind a router (w/o firewall) and have the Windows firewall enabled.  I am considering installing CFP 3.

My question has to do with whether or not a firewall (like CFP) will help prevent a really bad experience I had a few days ago.  I've always been very careful and over many years I have never had a virus or trojan or whatever infection on any of my home systems.  However, the other day I had Firefox parked on a supposedly safe page and while I was off eating lunch avast! went looney reporting viruses and trojans (I think one virus and multiple trojans).  There were tons of pop-ups and a new tab had opened in FF and IE had been started up and....it was ugly. 

The virus was antispywaremaster.  I wasn't able to clean things up and resorted to a full system disk restore from a Ghost image done 2 days earlier.  I couldn't use a system restore point because they had all been deleted (presumably by the infecting programs).

So I'm wondering if CFP would have prevented the install of antispywaremaster and the trojans?

Thanks,
Larry

[Melih]

it couldn't have executed if CFPv3 with D+ was installed! hence it couldn't have caused the damage!
this is a very good example of why "Prevention" is more important than "detection' against today's threats!

thanks
Melih

[Soyabeaner]

Moved 7 off-topic posts to here.

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