Shields UP!

[dm.su]

i got 3 reds... how do i get rid of them? and they said my connection reacted to ping or something... is there some way to prevent that? what change would it make? (unable to open some page, unable to connect with some programs?)

I think ping means that when someone over the internet scans for a connection by 'sending a signal' and your computer would respond to it, reporting like "Yep I'm here".

What firewall are you using and are you using a router? Some routers I know would have a port open on purpose.

[Rani]

i am using a router, but its supposed to be locked... so now i am really confused

[Twilight]

bl4ckm4lice & Rani
First, Do you use a router firewall?, if so, there are some ports you have to close on it, but, the router will know when to open the ports (for say when you use programs that need to get onto the internet, Like Bittorrent)
If your using a software firewall, i am not 100% sure (like the windows firewall)


About Pings. in router firewalls you can block them, just look for a tab saying "Discard PING from WAN side" or something along that line, its best to block pings all together from the outside, reason being, Hackers will do something called a "ping sweep" (i believe its called that) it pings an ip range to see if there are pc's on on that ip, then the ping will go back to the hacker, then the hacker will know, *oh this ip has a pc on it, i will try to hack to it* but if your router blocks pings, it won't return to the hacker, so the hacker will move onto the next ip (unless the hacker really know that your ip is that ip he/she input).

[Arch]

Wtf?! All I'm using is is the standard crappy Windows Firewall and it's all green

I'm not particularly sure an MS preinstalled program could be this effective. What do you guys think?

[ai_hitsuzen]

I got all blues except for one little green square. Does this test work for a Mac?

[dm.su]

I got all blues except for one little green square. Does this test work for a Mac?

If you're using a mac and used the shields-up site for testing, I think the reason why you got blue squares and one green is that the mac has a different type of firewall or a way of handling ports (like mini windows that open and close to allow connections). It's the same with Linux, I get the same results as you. It's still safe, you're ports are closed and not open, until told to do so.

When connecting to a router, the results should be green. If you haven't got a router, I recommend using one for a second firewall defence and networking in the future, if you wanted to.

To the previous poster, which I know posted a long time ago, Microsoft's firewall is a very good inbound protection (protecting from connections coming in), however, imo is not a very good outbound monitoring (applications trying to connect to the internet). Also it doesn't alert you of security connection alerts i.e IP xxx is trying to connect to port xx etc, which users might want to know what's happening. On the other hand, it's probably useful for users who do not want to be bothered by the security alerts.

[thyella]

All green! Yay...and all that with "only" AntiVir

[Munemasa Katagiri]

Maybe you guys have powerfull routers or your ISP's a good. XD That can help.

[kirika]

Mine is all green too. Even though this computer is sometimes too slow and I had to restore it a while ago because some hacker or virus got into my computer and deleted all my stuff etc (and it erased all my ipod data too grrr! >.<)

[blu chocobo]

Hm, I have one blue, and the rest green.

I think it's a good thing. XD I still have a difficult time understanding everything written on the site since I don't have a good understanding about technical things on a computer. ^^;