[XCSSA] Help I'm under attack!

[xcssa@xcssa.org]

xcssa-admin@xcssa.org wrote:
> What about some of you?  What do you run for your gateway/router/firewall?
> COTS?
> Homebrew/DIY?
> Hard drive distro?
> CDROM/USB distro?
> Reflash distro?
>
>   
I've had it both ways.  When I first got on RR (2000 sometime), I was 
directly connected.  Fortunately I worked with a couple of Captains at 
Security Hill who were CompSci majors.  They showed me the error of my 
ways, and I quickly bought a Netgear RT114 Router.  Back then, Netgear 
had just been bought by Bay/Nortel, and you could actually drop to a 
command line and play with things.  Then, a contractor in our office, 
who worked for Digital Equipment Corp, gave me a Multia UDB, which I 
promptly loaded RH 6.2 for Alpha and added a NIC to the single PCI 
slot.  That ran as my firewall for about a year, until it died.  Then, 
back to OTS Netgears for a while.

Now, since last October, I've been running IPCop on a Dell Latitude CPi 
333 P-II, so old it doesn't even have a built-in NIC.  I use a PCMCIA 
NIC for "green", and a USB NIC for "red".  I've downloaded and played 
with about a half-dozen firewall distros (m0n0wall, shorewall, etc) and 
I keep coming back to IPCop, just because I like it's "feel".  Very 
flexible, it has Dan's Guardian, transparent proxy-ing, a way of 
blocking outgoing traffic by MAC, DNS, DHCP server, etc.

OTS firewall/routers are safe enough, I think, as long as you don't have 
ANY ports to the outside world open.  No port forwarding, no remote 
management of your OTS router, etc.  Your inside network "hides" behind 
the NAT of the router.  I really haven't seen anything that shows 
vulnerabilities of NAT, if all outside access is closed off.  If your 
inside network is Windows based, I would be more worried about stuff 
riding in on web pages you surf to.  My XP box has Outlook Express 
uninstalled, Exploder disabled, and Firefox/Thunderbird installed and 
set up as the defaults. 

But I'm probably wrong.  I'm sure I'll find out here in a bit..;^)

-- 
"Government is not reason, it is not eloquence, it is force; like fire,
a troublesome servant and a fearful master. Never for a moment should
it be left to irresponsible action." -- George Washington
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Mitch Thompson, San Antonio, Texas//WB5UZG
Red Hat Certified Engineer