And since broadband connections are considered a tasty target for some criminal hackers who might try to use your line for malicious purposes, it includes a firewall, which can defend your machine from prying eyes.

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In each case we independently installed the firewall on an otherwise unprotected Quantex QP6 350 M2X, a Pentium II-350 machine equipped with 64MB of RAM and running Windows 98 SE.

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"Although the conditions to be checked may change over time, current experience suggests that such health checks should ensure that software patches are applied, a firewall is installed and configured correctly, an antivirus program with current signatures is running, and the machine is not currently infected with known malware, " he wrote in the accompanying paper.

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