eEye Digital Security

The firewall for Blink is not working for another user on my network.

The blink security system claims that the firewall is on, however the windows security system is reporting it as off. It also reported that the anti-virus was off. She was able to get the security system to report that the anti-virus was on by rebooting. But the security system still said the firewall was not working. She even tried to disable and renable the firewall on Blink itself, but nothing worked. The browser rules are gone, and when she opens a browser, a question is not asked. She also tested a program that she never created a rule for, and it updated without the firewall asking.

A problem like this occured months ago on the same computer. I think she had to reformat to get it to work. I would also like to mention that her updates for Blink weren't working either.

What would you suggest?

     If she does not mind recreating firewall rules again (to meet her specific needs), I would recommend that she resets Blink's configuration to its default settings.  The reset configuration function (if I remember correctly) is under the Tools menu at the top of Blink.

     Secondly, what operating system is she running Blink on?

I noticed the same thing on a fresh install.  The security center came up immediately after stopping the Windows Firewall/ICS service.  Is this service required to be running with Blink?

That seems to have fixed the problem, thanks. Another problem that she had was getting the latest update installed. It's in the process of being downloaded and it's taking a while.

JayEff:

I noticed the same thing on a fresh install.  The security center came up immediately after stopping the Windows Firewall/ICS service.  Is this service required to be running with Blink?

No that is just the service used to run the built in Windows OS Firewall.

I'm suspicious that it occured immediately after shutting down WFW/ICS.  Something is buggy.

Security Center is complaining there is no firewall and no anti-virus.  Is there a solution?

Security Center:

Firewall:

eeye Digital Security Blink Firewall reports that it is currently turned off....

(Firewall is enabled - alerts and unknown traffic is being generated normally and appears to be working)

Anti-Virus:

eeye Digital Security Blink AV reports that it is turned off...

(It is enabled and running scan on schedule)

I'm seeing initialization messages in the event log to confirm (according to Blink) that everything is running.

Thanks!

     I have heard rumors of this happening before, however, I am not sure what was the issue.  Maybe Nicula can comment on this from eEye.  I know in Windows XP I disabled that service completely and turned off the built in Windows XP firewall because it was pointless when using Blink and it only provides inbound filtering.  I also disabled the security center service completely in Windows XP.  I do know that a lot of people using Vista simply disable the firewall in Blink and use Vista's firewall (because it does do outbound filtering).  Granted it is not as robust and watchful (imo) as Blink's firewalls, BUT it is nice because by default (depending on what you have your system set in the networks connections section to be; either "private" or "public") the appropriate ports and services made available are adjusted for you depending on this setting.  If it is set to private all the ports you need to share resources on a LAN are made available and are opened in the firewall.  If you select public for when you are on a network that you do not trust, etc, all the vulnerable ports and services are blocked by the firewall for you.  Blink's firewall is nice, don't get me wrong, but Blink's true power lies within the other modules and layers.  I am currently using Windows Vista Ultimate 64bit edition and have Blink's firewall disabled and my system is very very quiet and useable.  It all depends what your needs are.

My guess is it's not registered properly in the Windows Security Center application.  Technet has some docs on this, but I wouldn't know how to fix this without more details.

It may also be a issue/conflict with disabling the WFW/ICS service.

I'll call this a bug for the time being until someone can provide more insight. 

Thanks Blue.

In reply to my own post, a reboot was performed and the problem disappeared.

Verified by loading Security Center and confirming it was reporting as 'ON'.