Thus, it has fallen to the IT Professional for the business to implement the appropriate security using the features provided. In the case of Microsoft, it has to cater to a very, very broad audience with very different needs and configurations. Most software is generally not configured as securely as it could be out of the box. Then, with Service Pack 2, Microsoft enabled the firewall in Windows XP and it has been on ever since. Of course, given that most people are never going to enable a security feature that is optional, security issues continued. It remained something optional that was on the user to enable. However, it didn’t automatically enable it. After that fact being exploited by malicious software to spread through networks, Microsoft added a firewall to Windows XP in Service Pack 1. Back when Microsoft released Windows XP it had no local firewall (yep, I know, hard to believe now).
