Will a firewall keep adware out?
I am really sure this is where my question should go, but it is the best choice I could find. I spent hours with my elderly friend today trying to clean up her computer. She was getting many "warnings" saying her computer would crash and burn if she didn't do a few things. They looked to her to be from Microsoft. I felt sure it was adware, and when I saw them for myself, I knew they were. She is running Windows 2000 Professional. I downloaded both SpyBot and Adaware and found many "bugs." The odd thing is that we both are pretty sure the only time they popped up was when she was on line. Does this mean that they weren't actually on her hard drive, and if so, why did they pop up? Where did they come from? I did go to one of the websites they recommended, and sure enough, it was a come-on to by a registry cleaner. She uses WalMart Connect for her ISP. After I used both the cleaners, I didn't get any more pop ups. I do hope we got rid of them. Has anyone else ever had any experience with this type of adware?
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A further piece of information - Windows XP, Service Pack 2 upgrades the security in Internet Explorer so that it's much harder for BHOs to get into your system in the first place, so you may want to discuss upgrading with your friend.
for the question you asked ,my answer will be "probably"..Because most of the firewalls do filtering based on layer3 which is IP...So you can get rid of attacks from evil guys..;) But now a days you can find these products are coming with builtin application later capabilities..such as ZoneAlarm Pro..This can be a good choice if you are looking to have a firewall with built in ad-ware or Anti-Virus stuff...But one thing to note even the product claims that it can do everything practically it may not possible..So a mix of tools will be of good help to you..my choice goes like ZoneAlarm with Microsoft AntiSpyware+Ad-Aware(Lavas