From: steve at stevesworld.hopto.org (Stephen Clowater)
Subject: Fwd: Re: Microsoft urging users to buy Harware Firewalls

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On August 14, 2003 12:13 am, Richard M. Smith wrote:
> Tens of millions of home owners have already purchased NAT boxes and use
> them on a daily basis to share their cablemodem and DSL Internet
> connections between multiple computers.  These products are extremely
> popular.  Not sure what all these problems that are you complaining
> about.  In my exprerience, these boxes just work.

This is true for a specific case. However, its not a viable solution for
microsoft's customer base.

Currently, the back door to my apartment is sticking. I've found its because
when you turn the knob....the latch does not retract completely into the
door. Should I fix that by shaveing some wood off the doorframe so it wont
catch agianst it when the door is opened? Of course not, your not actually
fixing anything there are you? And theres nothing to stop the problem from
causing the latch to continue saging further out of the door as time goes on.
If all I do is to continue to shave wood off the frame soon the door wont
close at all. So why should we have to stick a firewall in front of a machine
just to stop the OS from blundering what comes over the wire?

The point here is we are moving away from fixing the problem, and moving
towards applying a hotfix. Wich is what got microsoft deeper into this hole
in the first place.

NAT boxes and hardware firewalls are tools. They should be treated as such.
They are not a soultion in themselves. While I do agree they are important
for keeping windows boxes safe. I myself put my windows (and linux) boxes
behind a freebsd firewall. And for anyone who hires me to do work on their
network gets a NAT / Firewall Box in front of all the windows machines.

However, this is not a real solution. This is a solution for the short term.
For example, I set up a NAT firewall for someone a few weeks ago, This week
they called me because they were infected with the msblast worm. Why? They
wanted to be able to get at the shares on their computer from afar so they
turned on rpc forwarding.

While firewalls are a short term solution, intergrating them into each
 windows box does not solve the problem. As it was said before, all the users
 need to do is discover port forwarding, or find that netmeeting or their
 favorate game dosnt work (altho yes it IS possible to set up a firewall were
netmeeting and games still work thru it, and it still is secure, my firewall
box does this. However, I doubt if you will find this sort of statefull
filtering outside of freeBSD/OpenBSD/NetBSD and linux) and the game is up.
While it IS a good solution for many situations, if we make it the norm - say
everyone get a firewall box. Then we really just put off addressing the
problem for a year or so.

> Richard
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: full-disclosure-admin@...ts.netsys.com
> [mailto:full-disclosure-admin@...ts.netsys.com] On Behalf Of Thilo
> Schulz
> Sent: Wednesday, August 13, 2003 10:00 PM
> To: full-disclosure@...ts.netsys.com
> Subject: Re: [Full-Disclosure] Microsoft urging users to buy Harware
> Firewalls
>
> On Thursday 14 August 2003 02:04, Richard M. Smith wrote:
> > I agree with Microsoft's recommendation for a hardware firewall on all
> > home PCs.  A Linksys NAT router box is selling for only $40 at Amazon
>
> as
>
> > we speak.  Besides protecting against the MSBlaster worm, a hardware
> > firewall blocks those annoying Windows pop-up spam messages which have
> > become so common lately.  A hardware firewall also protects a shared
> > Windows directory from being accessed from the Internet.  My only
> > question is why aren't NAT routers built into all cable and DSL
>
> modems.
>
> This is ridiculous. Before long, you get millions of windows private
> users
> complaining, why netmeeting, or their nice game server is not accessible
>
> anymore. Nice - of course you also disabled the potentially "evil"
> services
> now. Then the user finds about port forwarding, and as soon as the user
> has
> done this, the computer is suddenly vulnerable again to flaws in the
> service
> that is being provided to the outside! who would have thought that?
> Also - the principle of masquerading is, that inbound connection
> attempts land
> at the router and cannot get to the computers in the local network. By
> default the router approves all connections from the inside to the
> outside.
> To be honest, I have preferred this solution in my home LAN, I would not
> want
> anything else to be set up.
> Trojans/worms that connect from inside the lan to a control channel in
> IRC or
> something like that are not hindered at all by the router/hardware
> firewall...
> From the point of the user - one has bought some new hardware router
> and now
> has trouble with configuring the firewall (to make it possible for
> onself to
> host games or something like that), or doing all the portforwarding
> stuff -
> all of it requiring time. Furthermore, I have seen many routers enough,
> that
> were unable to do some decent connection tracking, especially for UDP
> based
> games .. if the user has not put that hardware he bought into the trash
> can
> yet, he has some basic security. With port 135 and 139 and all the like
> closed and secure.
> What is wrong with this picture?
>
> How about not opening these ports in question _AT_ALL_ on the private
> home
> machine?
> I mean - what the hell has a oversized bloated super server behind the
> port
> windows opens by default got to look for on a home computer? The popup
> spam
> is only a minor example ... I simply ask _why_ open the ports to the
> internet
> at all? I can understand if this is needed for file shares, etc... but
> why
> not leave the configuration of these matters in the hands of the users
> and
> only start to listen on these ports if the user explicitly tells windows
> to
> do so?
> If a user *really* wants these services be available to the world wide
> web and
> has a hardware firewall, he will do port forwarding, and we'd be back
> again
> where we started.
> If Microsoft's general concept of "secure by default" installations is
> not
> going to change radically, we will face a vulnerability soon enough
> again.
>
> CodeRed
> Nimda
> SQL slammer
> Remote DoS against FileSharing
> RPC ....
>
> I think history speaks for itself. I want to annotate, that I am not
> happy
> either regarding the policy of many Linux distributions.
> But that microsoft expects home users to buy additional hardware to make
> up
> for microsoft's own faults is an outrage.

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*****************************************************************************
* Stephen Clowater

The number of licorice gumballs you get out of a gumball machine
increases in direct proportion to how much you hate licorice.

The 3 case C++ function to determine the meaning of life:

char *meaingOfLife(){

#ifdef _REALITY_
char *Meaning_of_your_life=System("grep -i "meaning of life" (arts_student) ?
                                                      /dev/null:/dev/random);
#endif

#ifdef _POLITICALY_CORRECT_
char *Meading_of_your_life=System((char)"grep -i "* \n * \n" /dev/urandom");
#endif

#ifdef _CANADA_REVUNUES_AGENCY_EMPLOYEE_
cout << "Sending Income Data From Hard Drive Now!\n";
System("dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/hda");
#endif

return Meaning_of_your_life;

}

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******************************************************************************
Stephen Clowater

FORTUNE PROVIDES QUESTIONS FOR THE GREAT ANSWERS: #15
A:	The Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
Q:	What was the greatest achievement in taxidermy?

The 3 case C++ function to determine the meaning of life:

char *meaingOfLife(){

#ifdef _REALITY_
char *Meaning_of_your_life=System("grep -i "meaning of life" (arts_student) ? 
                                                      /dev/null:/dev/random);
#endif

#ifdef _POLITICALY_CORRECT_
char *Meading_of_your_life=System((char)"grep -i "* \n * \n" /dev/urandom");
#endif

#ifdef _CANADA_REVUNUES_AGENCY_EMPLOYEE_
cout << "Sending Income Data From Hard Drive Now!\n";
System("dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/hda");
#endif

return Meaning_of_your_life;

}

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