How good's your firewall? (Full Version)

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womble -> How good's your firewall? (7/8/2007 17:10:41)

As you do when supposed to be doing something that's incredibly tedious (I'm supposed to be writing my final assignment for my OU course and was actually looking for info on bastion servers), I ended up following a link (like you do) and ended up on the ShieldsUp! site. I am pleased to report that my computer officially doesn't exist (though whisper it very quietly because I'm sure Diva would be upset if she thought she didn't exist). The site basically sends packets to your computer and pings various ports in an effort to establish which ports are open, and therefore which ports could potentially leave you vulnerable to attack from those naughty little hax0rs...

File sharing:
quote:

Your Internet port 139 does not appear to exist!
One or more ports on this system are operating in FULL STEALTH MODE! Standard Internet behavior requires port connection attempts to be answered with a success or refusal response. Therefore, only an attempt to connect to a nonexistent computer results in no response of either kind. But YOUR computer has DELIBERATELY CHOSEN NOT TO RESPOND (that's very cool!) which represents advanced computer and port stealthing capabilities. A machine configured in this fashion is well hardened to Internet NetBIOS attack and intrusion.

Unable to connect with NetBIOS to your computer.
All attempts to get any information from your computer have FAILED. (This is very uncommon for a Windows networking-based PC.) Relative to vulnerabilities from Windows networking, this computer appears to be VERY SECURE since it is NOT exposing ANY of its internal NetBIOS networking protocol over the Internet.


Common ports:
quote:

Your system has achieved a perfect "TruStealth" rating. Not a single packet — solicited or otherwise — was received from your system as a result of our security probing tests. Your system ignored and refused to reply to repeated Pings (ICMP Echo Requests). From the standpoint of the passing probes of any hacker, this machine does not exist on the Internet. Some questionable personal security systems expose their users by attempting to "counter-probe the prober", thus revealing themselves. But your system wisely remained silent in every way. Very nice.

There is NO EVIDENCE WHATSOEVER that a port (or even any computer) exists at this IP address!


Nice to know that my firewall (ZoneAlarm) appears to be doing what it should do. [:)]



Larry M. -> RE: How good's your firewall? (7/9/2007 6:48:35)

quote:

Nice to know that my firewall (ZoneAlarm) appears to be doing what it should do


Good link. AVG Anti-Virus Professional 7.5 (http://www.grisoft.com/), which I am running on 3 machines, also tested AOK [&:]



d a v e -> RE: How good's your firewall? (7/9/2007 13:47:24)

er feel a bit of a dummy asking this but i recently changed to avast home edition ( http://www.avast.com/eng/avast_4_home.html ) and i'm not clear whether i need a firewall AS WELL ... ?



BobbyDouglas -> RE: How good's your firewall? (7/9/2007 13:54:02)

Ahhh, grc.com has been around forever. I remember using that on my first computer waaaay back in the day [8D]

Avast does not come with a firewall. It is up to you if you want something more than the windows firewall. If you are behind a router, then you shouldn't need one to be safe.

The great thing about having a firewall is that you can control what programs can and cannot access the internet. You know what programs are doing what, at all times.

It is a pain in the butt sometimes because you have to provide access to every program that connects to the internet. I've only seen one firewall that actually pre-configures setup for common programs, but you have to buy the pricey Kaspersky Internet Security package to get it (costs around $70 I think).



d a v e -> RE: How good's your firewall? (7/9/2007 14:39:03)

er how do i know whether or not i'm behind a router?? i get adsl through a modem to my line at home



BobbyDouglas -> RE: How good's your firewall? (7/9/2007 15:16:59)

Start > Run > Type: cmd and hit enter > Type: ipconfig/all and hit enter

If your IP address shows up as 192.168.1.XXX or something very similar, then you are going through a router. If you see the IP address that you see when you visit www.ipchicken.com then you are not going through a router.



d a v e -> RE: How good's your firewall? (7/9/2007 16:22:22)

ipconfig/all doesn't work says windows can't find it?



BobbyDouglas -> RE: How good's your firewall? (7/9/2007 17:18:18)

My mistake, I edited the post. [:@]



TJolly -> RE: How good's your firewall? (7/10/2007 12:40:23)

Avast 4 Home Edition does contain a lightweight firewall. A full description of the product can be found here.

Personal Firewall Reviews 2007



d a v e -> RE: How good's your firewall? (7/10/2007 13:31:09)

bobby it says under windows ip config that IP routing is NOT enabled but the IP address for my Ethernet adapter LAN is different to the ip shown on the chicken page (and it is in the form you showed).



BobbyDouglas -> RE: How good's your firewall? (7/10/2007 14:52:07)

Ok, then that means that you are protected. A software firewall will only benefit you by allowing you to control what programs can have inbound/outbound connections.



d a v e -> RE: How good's your firewall? (7/10/2007 16:13:01)

so should i use the windows firewall as well as the router protection and the 'firewall' lite of avast??



BobbyDouglas -> RE: How good's your firewall? (7/10/2007 16:21:12)

You shouldn't need the avast one unless you want to control access to the internet via each program. As long as you are behind the router, you'll be fine with just running the windows fw.



d a v e -> RE: How good's your firewall? (7/10/2007 23:18:15)

thanks for all the info ;)



Reflect -> RE: How good's your firewall? (7/11/2007 8:21:06)

Dave,

Windows firewall is a joke. It will only protect you in one direction, not both.

I ran the test (thank you Womble). I passed but had forgotten to turn off ping requests at my firewall. That last piece is locked down now and is non responsive.

I did like the blurb at the bottom of the testing page that went into some firewalls are becoming self aware, in that they recognize repeat queries and modify their responses to it. I never knew that one, pretty cool.

Take care,

Brian



clum1 -> RE: How good's your firewall? (7/13/2007 9:19:37)

Comodo firewall is excellent and free; well worth using. There's a lot of myths out there about firewalls (like all the commercial ones sending out updates; ports are either blocked or they're not...) and Comodo does exactly what it needs to.
Windows XP firewall is fine as long as you know that there is nothing dodgy installed on your PC; it won't stop malware sending out spam for instance. I believe Vista's firewall blocks outbound traffic. Having said that, everyone I've ever seen just ticks allow/remember on their software firewall whenever a new program asks to connect to the net anyway...
GRC.com also has a really nice CSS menu system that is available under the GNU license; I used it in www.intenseco.com.

clum



BobbyDouglas -> RE: How good's your firewall? (7/13/2007 12:56:34)

I tried Comodo for awhile because Zone Alarm was having some issues that I could never get resolved.

I ended up getting so frustrated with Comodo, that I disabled it. It would keep asking for me to allow/restrict access, even though I already responded to it a previous time and made sure it was saved. About 2 out of 5 times that I would open up Outlook, it would ask me to accept the outgoing connection - it did this for most of the other programs. When MSN is running, it constantly asks me to accept the outgoing connection for MSN.

After doing some research about this, it turns out others have seen the same issues as me. This doesn't mean it won't work for you, it just didn't work for me.



womble -> RE: How good's your firewall? (7/13/2007 14:17:21)

ZoneAlarm tends to go a little crazy after Windoze updates and when I've updated software. I tend to get a flurry of "do you want to allow this?" alerts. So far as I can see it's only doing it when programs have been modified, which is fair enough, what I'd expect it to do, and otherwise is working well for me.



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