Windows Vista's Firewall offers false sense of security

Hey, you want to screw up a machine really quickly? Then give people access to Windows' System32 directory by default. We were hoping to get a list of programs that we could create some outbound blocking rules for. Instead, we were dumped into the Windows System32 directory. We knew our way around from here, but we're relatively certain most Windows users would be completely lost if asked to, from this starting point, hunt down the actual executable file that maps to the program that needs outbound blocking.

For David Berlind's write-up on Vista's inadequate personal firewall, see his blog post in ZDNet's TestBed blog.