New Vista firewall offers little outbound protection against spyware, Trojans and bots

Microsoft has touted Windows Vista as giving significant security improvements over Windows XP, and it offers the Windows Firewall, with its new two-way filtering feature, as one reason for that better security.

But as shipped, the Windows Firewall offers little outbound protection, and it's not clear how outbound protection can be configured to protect against spyware, Trojans and bots.

Firewalls such as the Windows Firewall work by halting dangerous connections a PC makes over the Internet. The Windows XP firewall offered inbound protection, but did not offer outbound protection. Some malware makes unwanted, invisible outbound connections with hackers, which let them take control of a PC.