I recieved a comment on my post regarding what I did to secure my network. John said:
Josh, I too want to be “secure� but for some reason I don’t really give a rat’s arse if one of my ports are open.
To me, this was an interesting comment. I realize that this particular post could have been boring to some, but I felt it was important to document what I did. When doing research to find out how to do this task, it took time that I felt was unnecessary. Making this info public perhaps reduces the time to find this information for the next person looking for it.
The most important part of the post was telling people that I had my network scanned to see if I had any vulnerablities with how I had my networking configured. Everybody should run this test to make sure that their network is not vulnerable to attacks.
Maybe I should explain why it is important to not have any ports open, or more important to be stealth to the rest of the Internet.
A computer has many ports. It is through these ports that it receives incoming communication. For example, when surfing the Internet, you are most likely receiving the information through port 80. As explained on GRC:
Open ports are the result of something in your system or network deliberately preparing to accept unsolicited incoming connections from unknown and anonymous machines on the Internet. Due to the inherent difficulty of writing completely secure programming code, a high percentage of open ports are “exploitable” by malicious Internet hackers. This means that sooner or later some clever “exploit” could be crafted to take advantage of your open ports to gain an advantage without your knowledge or permission.
These open ports come from a number of sources. The main source and most frightening is an “out-of-the-box” Windows computer.
There are many aspects involved in computer security. This is just one of them. And it is easy to figure if you are vulnerable. Is security important to you?
