North American Network Operators Group
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Re: FBI tells the public to call their ISP for help

  • From: Sean Donelan
  • Date: Thu Jun 14 10:36:46 2007

On Thu, 14 Jun 2007, Jack Bates wrote:
May I recommend developing an in house method for allowing the customer only access to your servers (web, dns, proxy, etc), and then apply filters for everything else except for tcp/80. If you wanted to be additionally paranoid, you could even allow only established tcp/80 connections back to the customer.

Once updated, customer could establish contact to have filters removed, or an automated web process you be created.

It's a ton of work, and there are any number of ways to do it. A lot depends on your network. It can be done, though.

I went down that road several times, and there are many issues with what you have described which won't work for how Microsoft distributes its updates and patches; and with the user. Microsoft has enabled Windows with enough features, users can infect their machine with only TCP/80.
Please review the archives for details from several years ago, and at
some point you will end up needing to violate the written Microsoft licenses.

Its not a technical problem (although engineers seem to like to think everything is), its a legal issue with Microsoft's lawyer and licenses.