EVE General Discussion

The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Anyone want a peanut?

Give me a ping, Vasili. One ping only, please.

I think I see what you did there.

Oh my, this is priceless.

You talk about having your computer setup with great security but you have port 80 open? Lol that is classic.
Just more proof you have no clue how to setup computer security.

I route all Internet traffic through port 8080. Port 80 is the default port for HTTP traffic and is the first port that is attacked when trying to hack into a remote machine. This is a very simple setup and can be done in any router or firewall software and can be done by non IT professionals that have some knowledge of computers.

Man, your security is like the story of the three little pigs. You just happen to be the Pig that build his security out of straw and wonder why the big bad wolf still gets in.

It does not matter, at all. Anyone pinging port 80 against a machine behind a NAT will simply receive no response, since the packet is not routed anywhere. This is what you want, since you have plausible deniability; there is no evidence a machine is even there.

A weaker solution is to deliberately forward all non-routed packets as routed to one host (DMZ) in which case a software firewall will either report the port closed, or not respond. The latter is functionally identical. Replying with a closed port indicates a machine is there and will result in your machine being shortlisted and pinged at intervals. The complete absence of *any* firewall at all is surprisingly not that insecure; the attacker still needs to exploit an unknown/unpatched software vulnerability to do anything.

I'm pretty sure OP is using one of those firewalls (such as COMODO) that has an "advanced" mode which allows you to control every DLL and every single port that every application can have access to. They're a massive resource hog, have compatibility issues (see:OP) and take a lot of user effort for negligable gain.

Lastly, they are absolutely zero use against modern rootkits, which disable the service as a first call to action. Rootkits like zeroaccess / sirefef currently have no software based defense, outside of A/V solutions that scan incoming traffic. A firewall is of zero use at all.

I had a client who shot himself in the foot with all this "BLOCK ALL THE THINGS!!" mentality; he had stopped java from checking for updates, which lead to him getting a trojan which perfectly spoofed itself as his DNS service and installed into his TCP/IP stack. I still have an image of his HDD because it's a fantastic example of a little knowledge causing harm. A machine with no A/V or firewall installed (but with updates running) is immune to the same trojan because the exploit was patched out.

Yeah, pretty much had the same scary visual myself.

"There is not [sic] such thing as hack proof or 100% security when we are talking about technology."

While this is strictly true, you can get pretty damn close to 100% security if you design the system from the bottom up to be secure. In fact, I would argue that with the proper resources you could design a system which can ONLY be compromised by some sort of physical intrusion or exploiting human error.

Hunt for Red October!