Good firewall prog?

Robert Baer wrote in news:bbsUe.8327$Wd7.34 @newsread1.news.pas.earthlink.net:

I'm very content with Agnitum Outpost Free

All well and fine, BUT... What if one is a dummy like me and has no clue about all those ports (and uses) - just wante symple seekuritee?

Good question. I'm quite the dummy also when it comes to networks.

The Barricade help file lists some ports that allow sending and receiving mail, reading news and browsing (25, 110, 119, 80, 53), implying that having only those open is safe.

My question is... can a trojan do bad things thru those ports?

...Jim Thompson

--
|  James E.Thompson, P.E.                           |    mens     |
|  Analog Innovations, Inc.                         |     et      |
|  Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC\'s and Discrete Systems  |    manus    |
|  Phoenix, Arizona            Voice:(480)460-2350  |             |
|  E-mail Address at Website     Fax:(480)460-2142  |  Brass Rat  |
|       http://www.analog-innovations.com           |    1962     |
             
I love to cook with wine.      Sometimes I even put it in the food.

Eyeup! That wuz the foist-un I bought at a mere $6000 or so... Waited a number of months and some new company had a memory board that held 512K that cost about the same as what IBM waqnted for their

64K? or 128K? anyway their largest available. Then someone had a patch..DOS 1.05 which allowed each side of a floppy to act as a drive. Upwards from there.

Nope. My PC1 had a 64K motherboard (48K populated) with 16K minimum configuration. I bought it in April '82 (employee "first day order" lottery) and it came with DOS 1.05 (bought 1.0, updated to 1.05). The

256K motherboards came out a couple of years later, with the XT IIRC.

Floppys (single sided) were also available for the original 5150 (mine came with one). There may have been a requirement for at least 48K for floppys though (48K was our minimum configuration).

--
   Keith

(NetBios).

Can ports that have been closed by a router be opened by software?

...Jim Thompson

--
|  James E.Thompson, P.E.                           |    mens     |
|  Analog Innovations, Inc.                         |     et      |
|  Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC\'s and Discrete Systems  |    manus    |
|  Phoenix, Arizona            Voice:(480)460-2350  |             |
|  E-mail Address at Website     Fax:(480)460-2142  |  Brass Rat  |
|       http://www.analog-innovations.com           |    1962     |
             
I love to cook with wine.      Sometimes I even put it in the food.

[*** snipped]

OK. That's more like what I would say.

True. And it's even more useless (as if it needs any more defects). It's from MS, with the ability to create any holes it wants. Reminds me of the saying "the fox guarding the henhouse".

Then, you could consider it even MORE useless than that (that's NEGATIVE net value) since too many new users will think it's a firewall, and since most people are lazy, will never install a real one.

--
104 days until the winter solstice celebration

"Today, the theory of evolution is an accepted fact
for everyone but a fundamentalist minority, whose
objections are based not on reasoning but on
doctrinaire adherence to religious principles"
-- James D. Watson

The first PCs had 5 slots and 16KB. The motherboard could be upgraded to 64KB. As first, most people would be using cassette, since disks cost so much.

When people got disks (and so could use DOS), not all would have upgraded the RAM. I even remember something about the first version of MS assembler being usable on a 16KB system.

256KB required an add-on card (supposedly you could get 640KB, but physical limitations on those early PCs prevented having over 320KB, 64KB on board plus 4 64KB expansion cards).

The upgrade to 64KB (upgradable to 256KB) motherboards came later. Then it was 640KB.

--
104 days until the winter solstice celebration

"Today, the theory of evolution is an accepted fact
for everyone but a fundamentalist minority, whose
objections are based not on reasoning but on
doctrinaire adherence to religious principles"
-- James D. Watson

Each side as a separate disk. I remember making some of those "flippies".

BTW, have you ever used 8-inch floppies on a PC? I say it once in a computer store?

--
104 days until the winter solstice celebration

"Today, the theory of evolution is an accepted fact
for everyone but a fundamentalist minority, whose
objections are based not on reasoning but on
doctrinaire adherence to religious principles"
-- James D. Watson

Maybe that MASM (assembler that would run in 16KB RAM) was a cassette version. That would be a lot of work, writing assembly language programs when you don't have a disk.

--
104 days until the winter solstice celebration

"Today, the theory of evolution is an accepted fact
for everyone but a fundamentalist minority, whose
objections are based not on reasoning but on
doctrinaire adherence to religious principles"
-- James D. Watson

There's advantages to knowing things...

I read a lot of books about networking, and knew more than many people before ever getting involved in it.

--
104 days until the winter solstice celebration

"The government of the United States not, in any
sense, founded on the Christian religion."
-- GEORGE WASHINGTON--Treaty of Tripoli 1796

They do (although you might find one called a "internet sharing device") but seem to be harder to find.

The router you want should have a DE9 (often mistakenly called DB9) serial connector on it, for direct connection to any external RS232 modem. I've also used one that had the modem built-in.

--
104 days until the winter solstice celebration

"Today, the theory of evolution is an accepted fact
for everyone but a fundamentalist minority, whose
objections are based not on reasoning but on
doctrinaire adherence to religious principles"
-- James D. Watson

It leaves you vulnerable to every bit of software on that computer, that is capable of opening ports.

That would be assuming that all those ports STAY closed. An unwarranted assumption.

I guess you didn't read that. I said I HOPE IT'S NOT...

It did. It blocked the connection, and told me that a program was TRYING to open it. Of course I denied the connection.

I never said anything of the sort. You may be confusing "must do" with "can benefit from doing". That sort of thing is may I mentioned laziness previously.

Why do you keep assuming that doing one thing (such as running a software firewall) PREVENTS you from doing something else (such as closing ports)?

That's OK. What I'm objecting to is DOING AWAY WITH the firewall.

True. What I'm talking about is more like putting a paint job on a auto that ALREADY GOT the engine overhaul.

Yes. And can still benefit from other things as well.

And very few users will be exempt from that "high risk" category.

--
104 days until the winter solstice celebration

"Today, the theory of evolution is an accepted fact
for everyone but a fundamentalist minority, whose
objections are based not on reasoning but on
doctrinaire adherence to religious principles"
-- James D. Watson

Good example, thanks. However, in the context of single PC users not interested in file/printer sharing, hardening the OS (closing all ports) may well have prevented the infestation in the first place. As I said elsewhere, we see so much of this kind of thing on the virus newsgroups where users temporarily disable their sw firewall and take hits.

Art

Yes. For inbound, they're already blocked by NAT.

That may be all you need. It would be nice to know what particular ports are involved.

--
104 days until the winter solstice celebration

"Today, the theory of evolution is an accepted fact
for everyone but a fundamentalist minority, whose
objections are based not on reasoning but on
doctrinaire adherence to religious principles"
-- James D. Watson

A software firewall on the computer does have access to that information. That's one of the advantages of having that as well.

Outbound port blocking (at the router) should be limited to those that don't need to be used (on the internet) for anything. The ones I block are the ones used for things like File and Printer Sharing.

--
104 days until the winter solstice celebration

"Today, the theory of evolution is an accepted fact
for everyone but a fundamentalist minority, whose
objections are based not on reasoning but on
doctrinaire adherence to religious principles"
-- James D. Watson

They frequently don't SHOW you what they're doing.

A common action of updates.

Could you provide a link to that?

--
104 days until the winter solstice celebration

"Today, the theory of evolution is an accepted fact
for everyone but a fundamentalist minority, whose
objections are based not on reasoning but on
doctrinaire adherence to religious principles"
-- James D. Watson

Yes, closing ports would make you safer. So would running a firewall. Both would make you even MORE safer.

--
104 days until the winter solstice celebration

"Today, the theory of evolution is an accepted fact
for everyone but a fundamentalist minority, whose
objections are based not on reasoning but on
doctrinaire adherence to religious principles"
-- James D. Watson