sharke
Maybe I'm full of it here but I tend to think there's too much paranoia associated with having your DAW connected to the internet. I've never had a virus screw anything up in 15 years of being online. Just turn on your virus protection when you visit the internet, and stay away from Russian porn sites
You've never had a virus screw anything up in 15 years of being online YET!
Oh well here goes...
I can understand why if your DAW PC is your work & lifeline, why you wouldn't want to generally surf & I don't think anyone is being paranoid here either.
Most malware which screws up major computer systems or lots of PCs these days are what's called "zero day threats" - Google that for more details as I could write a novel on that subject but this isn't the place.
What that means is that most Anti-Virus packages are useless against these threats as most AV packages can't & don't detect them. Why? Because the malware is custom written for a specific target/job.
How do they do it? Easy! Crime gangs write the code until they get it to work against every known AV vendors engine. How can they do that without taking days & days? Easy, they use Virus Total (Google that) as that allows you to submit code which it will test against every AV vendors engine.
And there you have it, within minutes you have malware code which will bypass any AV scanner. Why? Because traditional AV products use signatures to detect malware & even when they find a new piece of malware, it takes time for them to write a reliable signature, test it, release it & customers to get it, especially if they're not regularly connected to the Internet!!!
But I hear someone say, firstly it has to get on to my machine by which time the AV vendors have written signatures which'll detect it & secondly I'm not stupid enough to surf porn or warez sites which probably host that sh*t right? Wrong & wrong!!! Why?
These days, organised crime gangs hire clever computer programmers to write these efficient little programs & then they employ clever hackers to find vulnerabilities in web pages (they pay huge sums of money for such talent) most of which belong to the top 100 surfed web sites today & then they embed/hide their code in their website so when you visit your known, trusted web site, hey presto the code is downloaded to your PC & this happens each & everyday!
Only last year eBay got done one weekend. This was a classic as they attacked the third-party advertising company who also provide the "banner ads" for many other well-known shopping sites, like Amazon, Gumtree, etc. They also did this on a Friday evening when they knew most of the IT team had gone home so that they could get maximum impact.
That weekend, anyone who visited eBay got a prompt to automatically download a "trusted" file from eBay because it was to "update certain new functionality" & loads of people got infected as their AV programs didn't detect the malware & as they trusted eBay, they downloaded & installed the file.
Ebay didn't block the 3rd party ads until late Saturday evening & I believe it was because most of the IT team had gone home for the weekend, they were unable to get the company to clean up their servers quickly.
And since, the malware writers have really got clever as now they find a vulnerability in a site, embed a link to another site where the malware sits but they don't actually upload the malware code until they've done a number of sites & then they upload the malware to the embeded URL where it executes. This is to avoid the possibility of their code being discovered & getting sent to an AV vendor for analysis.
This way, only the customers of the site get the malware as the vendor/web site don't actually see it.
So, I think if anyone wants to resist casual surfing on their DAW PCs, I think this is very wise & a highly recommended precaution.
However, as long as your computer sits behind a "hardware" firewall, it should be safe if it has to connect to certain web sites to authorise programs & if you're that paranoid, I'd recommend blocking internet access from your DAW but create rules on your hardware firewall which only allows it access to the sites that you need to authorise programs or download your updates.
Hope that helps & don't have nightmares . . .
(sorry as that was probably one chapter of the novel)