Thoughts on 'answering' pings.

GRC.com "Shields Up" shows all green except for a warning that I am visible because my router is answering pings. Do I forgo BQM for the sake of getting all green lights? What are the pros and cons?

p.s. - Although I have a static IP it isn't any benefit to me (other than making BQM possible) so I thought about giving that up as well. Just because I'm paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get me 8^)

Edited by longedge (Fri 02-Jan-15 09:40:53)

Does your router perhaps allow you to permit ICMP ping from only certain sources? It all depends how sophisticated its firewall is.

In reply to a post by longedge:

GRC.com "Shields Up" shows all green except for a warning that I am visible because my router is answering pings. Do I forgo BQM for the sake of getting all green lights? What are the pros and cons?

GRC / Steve Gibson started this debate in the late 90s. The assumption that anyone looking to maliciously intrude (aka "hack") into your router is going to find it _only_ by ping is naive in the extreme.

In the US at that time home routers were very rare and cable modems had just become popular. Cable firms sold connections for 2 computers in a house by using a hub. Each computer had a public IP address. Home routers then appeared in a big way with the Linksys BEFSR41 and it was a few firmware updates later that "don't respond to Ping on WAN port" became an option.

I've never seen it as a security feature. Just something to keep Steve Gibson happy.

There may be good reasons to allow ping, it assists in Path-MTU discovery, but as network capacity has increased that is a lot less interesting.