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Saturday August 26, 2017

How firewalls protect hackers, not you

Most people are blissfully unaware of how easy it is for a hacker to get into their computer even though they have a firewall and anti virus package. That's one of the reasons why it's easy. If you feel safe you don't take proper precautions. Firewalls, the only real way to stop a hacker, are for the most part a complete waste of time. That's because they are set up to deal with the extreme case of someone running a big network and using SSH and other completely unnecessary facilities. This is how Google explains SSH: Also known as Secure Socket Shell, SSH is a network protocol that provides administrators with a secure way to access a remote computer. SSH also refers to the suite of utilities that implement the protocol. Well, I don't believe SSH is secure, but leave that aside; how often does the average computer user need to do this? I think the answer would be: not till hell freezes over! So how come the standard (and rather wonderful) Linux firewall (UFW) does not as a default ban SSH? The only logical conclusion I can come up with, is to help out the hackers. Even if (as is claimed) SSH is secure (and if Hillary Clinton's email server can be hacked, I'm far from clear exactly what 'secure' means) why bother to uselessly have it available when hardly anyone will ever use it? It could be argued, I suppose that some clever individual might want to enter into some kind of SSH based legitimate transaction with your computer, but then the clever individual could tell you how to open the port for the duration! SSH runs on port 22 I am told and this might even be true (though I have my doubts) so it's quite easy to add a rule to block port 22: If you have Linux open terminal and run: ufw deny 22 If UFW is running this will block SSH. You can check by running: ufw status verbose With the port blocked I can use FTP, run a browser and download software from the Linux repository

Posted by Jonathan Brind.

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Saturday August 26, 2017