North American Network Operators Group
Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical

Re: Block all servers?

  • From: Petri Helenius
  • Date: Sun Oct 12 04:36:47 2003 
Terry Baranski wrote:
That being said, NAT does break stuff and as has been mentioned,
filtering is certainly possible without having to bring NAT into the
mix. Microsoft assures us that the Windows firewall will be enabled by
default starting with WinXP patches early next year. How easy will it
be to turn it off? Will a virus be able to do it for you?

I would expect most new sophisticated trojans to include this functionality. Most home
users run their WinXP with "Local Administrator" rights anyway because othervise many
activities would be more complicated to accomplish. Many turn off AV products already.

I would also expect the sophisticated trojans to include NATPT like funcitionality when
it becomes neccessary to accumulate the needed number of zombies for effective
DDoS and other distruptive activities. We already see them utilizing the local
SMTP configuration on the machine to use the relays the user is supposed to.

The Road Ahead is to make DDoS and abuse mitigation more efficient
and put some real security into the application architechtures without making them unusable.

Pete


Pete