Windows Firewall was first introduced as part of Windows XP Service Pack 2. Every type of network connection, whether it is wired, wireless, VPN, or even FireWire, has the firewall enabled by default, with some built-in exceptions to allow connections from machines on the local network. It also fixed a problem whereby the firewall policies would not be enabled on a network connection until several seconds after the connection itself was created, thereby creating a window of vulnerability. A number of additions were made to Group Policy, so that Windows system administrators could configure the Windows Firewall product on a company-wide level. XP’s Windows Firewall cannot block outbound connections; it is only capable of blocking inbound ones.
Windows Firewall turned out to be one of the two most significant reasons (the other being DCOM activation security) that many corporations did not upgrade to Service Pack 2 in a timely fashion. Around the time of SP2’s release, a number of Internet sites were reporting significant application compatibility issues, though the majority of those ended up being nothing more than ports that needed to be opened on the firewall so that components of distributed systems (typically backup and antivirus solutions) could communicate.
Tags: Firewall Software, Personal Firewall, windows xp firewall