Anyone Tried Shield's Up?

[Guest]

[schwanxe]

From Gibson Research Corp?

http://www.grc.com/intro.htm

It's pretty cool.  When you log onto the site the first thing it tests is if your ISP connection has a reverse DNS.

It tests your ports (not all) and makes sure they are all running in stealth.  You can look up and test specific ports.  Also it will test your computer's ability against TCP and NetBIOS attacks.

They also have a cool Leak Test on their site.

Comodo scored perfectly for me on all tests.

[aussiebear]

Personally, I'm very weary of such automated tools and the reputation of Steve Gibson himself.
Mr Gibson is a "showman", in that he influences people with market rather than actual hacking skills.

If you go to the annual Black Hat conference (where hackers or "security researchers", crackers demonstrate how to break things), you will not find Steve Gibson there.

If you really want to test a firewall, you start studying about network security, the OS you use, learn how to reverse-engineer and get familiar with the various attack or penetration test tools available on the web. As you get more skilled, you end up writing your own custom tools. You'll then know enough to try and break or bypass firewalls.

Automated tools are nowhere on the same level as a skilled hacker/cracker. Its a whole different ballgame compared to port scan tools.

[sukarof]

LOL! I think that if the average user could manage to understand everything about network security, they wouldnt use Comodo. They would probably have all the skills (and will) needed  to configure firewalls like Jetico or Core Force (or why not Linux ) where they have control of almost any aspect of networking security.

Even though Gibson doesn't attend Blackhat conference I think that with automated scans you get at least some indication of how visible you are on the net.

And as for the topic, yes I think the most of us have visited GRC.com and other web based scan engines like PCFlank, auditmypc and so on and Comodo does great on all of them afaik.

[Tunerz]

Just tried it a while ago, and I looked below and saw something that reads no reverse dns then clicked on the other tests (At first I don't know how it show and what will be the results) just like a curious person then voila! All passed especially the important All ports thingy which is 1000+ YAY!

[dustydave]

hello                                                                                                                                                       i just installed comodo last night --i went to my ips security solution which is pc guard as a change from zone alarm,no problems with it,but i felt like a change,as you do.after problems with pcguard i went to reinstall zone alarm but there was a problem with true vector which seemed to be running but i could find no sign of it anywhere in services or processes,anyway it wouldnt install so i came across comodo and thought id give it a try.all three of the above firewalls pass SHIELDS UP port scans 100% stealth,so i have no complaints on that score with any of them,but i like the approach that comodo are taking to security and the details section in the connections tab has some good information                                                                                                                                                     im going off topic here so yes i use shields up regularly its a useful site and hats off to comodo

[p2u]

From Gibson Research Corp?

http://www.grc.com/intro.htm

It's pretty cool.  When you log onto the site the first thing it tests is if your ISP connection has a reverse DNS.

It tests your ports (not all) and makes sure they are all running in stealth.  You can look up and test specific ports.  Also it will test your computer's ability against TCP and NetBIOS attacks.

They also have a cool Leak Test on their site.

Comodo scored perfectly for me on all tests.

Hi, schwanxe!

Sorry to disappoint you, but although I count Steve Gibson among my friends, his on-line scanning features don't say anything about how safe you are on the Net.
To have at least a little more reliable indication, you should do a LOCAL port scan, for example with this tool:
http://www.foundstone.com/resources/proddesc/superscan.htm
The address to scan is 127.0.0.1 (= localhost).
You could also use TCPView:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/utilities/TcpView.mspx
Download link down the page (55KB). No install needed. Just open tcpview.exe and it will tell you what ports are open and which programs keep them open.
'ESTABLISHED' & 'TIME_WAIT' are OK.
'LISTENING' and *.* are not OK.

Then start off by reading this:
http://forums.comodo.com/index.php?topic=3777.15
(the part about disabling UNNECESSARY Windows services)
No need to learn how to reverse-engineer, how to program, etc. Just keep your ports closed and get the max out of COMODO's features!!!

Paul Wynant
Moscow, Russia

[p2u]

If you go to the annual Black Hat conference (where hackers or "security researchers", crackers demonstrate how to break things), you will not find Steve Gibson there.

Hi, aussiebear!

Let me start off by saying that I share your scepticism towards on-line scanning tools. I doubt, though, that the value of a person in the security business can be established by the frequency with which he/she appears on the Black Hat conference. Does that really make you a great hacker? From what I understand, the people who appear there are just too busy looking good...

My friend, I dare say so, Steve Gibson, has done a great deal to make people at least aware of the problem with open ports, of vulnerable Windows services, etc. I don't share his opinion about Stealth (he was the one who coined the term). If a hacker doesn't receive a reply to an Echo Request (Ping), he will know for sure that there's somebody there 'protected' by a firewall. If there weren't anybody on that address, he would get a 'host unreachable' message from the server, right? And still all security vendors run after Steve Gibson and claim that they can 'stealth' your computer. But that aside, he IS a great person and deserves a place in the history of Internet security pioneers...

Paul Wynant
Moscow, Russia

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