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.
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.
"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.