"If it becomes a perception that the Internet is a dangerous place to walk at night, that hurts us all," said Fred Felman, vice president of marketing for security software maker Zone Labs, which is a supporter of Personal Firewall Day.
Paul Robertson, director of risk assessment with TruSecure and the original proponent of the idea, said that safer home systems mean a more secure Internet in general.
"The zombies used for DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attacks and the proxy servers that help spammers are all on consumers' home machines," he said. "That's the biggest part of the security problem on the Internet."