This page is
aimed primarily at the home user but also stands for any internet enabled
PC.
After
being on the receiving end of quite a few scans and probes and spending
a while learning the in's and out's of NMAP and a few other scanners, it has honed
my skills no end, mainly in trying to understand the output from various
firewalls logs and what ports these scans are looking for.
What I have
seen has made a few simple things apparent to me to stop script kiddies
and lamers from accessing your PC.
The more determined attackers
will go to further extremes. I have seen spoofed IP packets supposedly
from my PC being sent back to me, which was quite entertaining and ingenious,
from a client on the same ISP, among other less dramatic attempts to
compromise my security.
It is a simple
fact of life these days if you have a browser and you are on the web, i.e.
connected to it, somebody is going to scan you sooner or later, there are
people out there who do nothing else but scan IP address ranges all the
time, and as most of it is automated these days, the software will probe
and attempt to connect to you.
What people
and the automated scripted software are looking for are exploitable
weaknesses available on your computer either in a misconfigured firewall
or no firewall at all; or looking for Trojans planted on your PC.
This leads on
to understanding those weaknesses and what you can do about them.
There are a
number of things you can do:
