1995 through 2002.
The firewalls block a lot of the ports used by online games these days, and there are security appliances that can (and do) sniff the contents of http streams and close the connections in the proxies if they see non-approved traffic on the corporate networks.
cisco doesn’t depends on Windows security (such as it is) to secure networks. They have a network-centric view of the world (no big surprise there), so they like to assume dumb (or in the case of Windows, idiot savant) clients. The benefit to this approach is that by securing the network, you no longer are bound to any one OS’s view or implementation of security. The security on their Unix servers is quite tight, but we have to be realistic and say that the marketing and sales people are never going to get past the login prompt on a *nix system. The doc people don’t want to use Windows, but the engineers using AutoCAD have to, other engineers doing chip simulations have to use Solaris, yet others have to use *BSD implementations on PC’s, etc, etc, etc.
For all of that, while I was there, there was no bigger headache for security that Windows. And from talking to people still there, that’s still the case - mostly because when people take their PC laptops outside the corporate net, they forget to increase their paranoia about the threats that they would not see inside the corporate net with the IDS boxes between them and the rest of the world.
I’d think the biggest threat to security is the dumb user that is determined to get a virus no matter what you do :-)
And yes they do exist in abundance. And unfortunately that has forced Microsoft and other vendors to lock down the capabilities many of the “good” users like to have. It’s like socialism...we have to dumb it down to the dumbest user. Or I guess that’s Apple’s philosophy too.