McAfee Help

Customizing Personal Firewall security

Personal Firewall allows you to control program activities that can compromise the security of your PC. You can control how your PC handles programs trying to access the Internet on startup, how it communicates with other PCs, how it handles intrusion attempts from hackers, and even how it reports on your security vulnerabilities.

Tasks
Protect your PC during startup
When you turn on your PC, it goes through a startup routine before all programs, including Personal Firewall, become fully operational. During this time, some of the programs on your PC might attempt to access the Internet. Unless you protect your PC during startup, those programs are allowed access. This can be a security risk.
Change settings for ping requests
You can allow your PC to be seen by other PC users on your network by allowing ICMP ping requests, which are communications from one PC that test if another PC is reachable over a network. You should allow ICMP ping requests if you want other PCs to be able to communicate with your PC, or if you are trying to troubleshoot a networking issue.
Change settings for UDP tracking
The User Datagram Protocol is one of the protocols used for Internet access, allowing applications to send and receive information with low processing overhead, in the form of datagrams.
Set up Attack Detection
Most attacks are targeted at vulnerabilities in the operating system of your PC, which can develop especially when you are not receiving regular updates to your operating system. Default settings for Personal Firewall include automatic detection for the most common intrusion attempts, but you can increase your protection by selecting specific intrusion attempts for Personal Firewall to detect.
Change settings for Protection Alerts
When you turn off Personal Firewall, your PC is vulnerable to threats and your protection status on the Home Page is "at risk."