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Windows Firewall is a Personal Firewall , included with Microsoft 's Windows XP , Windows Server 2003 , and Windows Vista operating systems. OVERVIEW When Windows XP was originally shipped in October 2001 , it included a limited firewall called "Internet Connection Firewall". It was disabled by default due to concerns with backward compatibility, and the configuration screens were buried away in network configuration screens that many users never looked at. As a result, it was rarely used. In mid-2003, the Blaster Worm attacked a large number of Windows machines, taking advantage of flaws in the RPC Windows service. Several months later, the Sasser Worm did something similar. The ongoing prevalence of these worms through 2004 resulted in unpatched machines being infected within a matter of minutes. Because of these incidents, as well as other criticisms that Microsoft was not being proactive in protecting customers from threats, Microsoft decided to significantly improve both the functionality and the interface of Windows XP's built-in firewall, and rebrand it as, simply, "Windows Firewall". VERSIONS Windows XP 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. 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. Windows Server 2003 In March 2005 , Microsoft released Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1, which incorporated the same improvements to the firewall product into their server operating system. Windows Vista See Also: Features new to Windows Vista ]] Windows Vista significantly improves the firewall to address a number of concerns around the flexibility of ''Windows Firewall'' in a corporate environment:
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