In reply to a post by Tox_Laximus:

Dr TCP fixed the mtu, the problem was probably in the registry, and windows 7 does not set the mtu automatically.

Dr TCP shouldn't be used on Win Vista or 7 as it says in the documentation - also not on 64bit of either.

As for letting your router respond to ping requests, when playing hide and seek is it best to answer if the seeker calls out, or is it better to keep quiet?

You're not playing hide and seek. There are thousands or IPs on ISP accounts, all of which are known to be allocated to the ISPs customer user base and made publicly available at RIPE (for Europe).

Any malicious attacker looking for a target is going to scan IPs using proper tools, not just with ICMP echo. Thats what 5 years olds do playing hide and seek, and your router can keep out pretty much everything (unless you have port forwarding).

Adults use TCP and UDP pings and other tools.

So basically blocking ICMP echo is hurting you more than its hurting the attacker or "hacker" as the press calls them.

In reply to a post by jchamier:

In reply to a post by Tox_Laximus:

Dr TCP fixed the mtu, the problem was probably in the registry, and windows 7 does not set the mtu automatically.

Dr TCP shouldn't be used on Win Vista or 7 as it says in the documentation - also not on 64bit of either.

As for letting your router respond to ping requests, when playing hide and seek is it best to answer if the seeker calls out, or is it better to keep quiet?

You're not playing hide and seek. There are thousands or IPs on ISP accounts, all of which are known to be allocated to the ISPs customer user base and made publicly available at RIPE (for Europe).

Any malicious attacker looking for a target is going to scan IPs using proper tools, not just with ICMP echo. Thats what 5 years olds do playing hide and seek, and your router can keep out pretty much everything (unless you have port forwarding).

Adults use TCP and UDP pings and other tools.

So basically blocking ICMP echo is hurting you more than its hurting the attacker or "hacker" as the press calls them.

Dr tcp gave me a extra 0.4MB

Can you explain how being stealth is hurting me?

In reply to a post by Tox_Laximus:

Can you explain how being stealth is hurting me?

Can you explain how it's helping you?

In reply to a post by BatBoy:

In reply to a post by Tox_Laximus:

Can you explain how being stealth is hurting me?

Can you explain how it's helping you?

I'll paste some test results....

Your Internet port 139 does not appear to exist!
One or more ports on this system are operating in FULL STEALTH MODE! Standard Internet behavior requires port connection attempts to be answered with a success or refusal response. Therefore, only an attempt to connect to a nonexistent computer results in no response of either kind. But YOUR computer has DELIBERATELY CHOSEN NOT TO RESPOND (that's very cool!) which represents advanced computer and port stealthing capabilities. A machine configured in this fashion is well hardened to Internet NetBIOS attack and intrusion.

Unable to connect with NetBIOS to your computer.
All attempts to get any information from your computer have FAILED. (This is very uncommon for a Windows networking-based PC.) Relative to vulnerabilities from Windows networking, this computer appears to be VERY SECURE since it is NOT exposing ANY of its internal NetBIOS networking protocol over the Internet.

Its a waste of time running system hogging security suites on my pc, I haven't for years, just a manual virus scan every week or so and I never get any problems, but what I do get is raw speed as some of these AV's can put quite a big dent in performance.

So a lot of people don't know about this and broadcast their presence, this makes it even better for me

Thanks for that Mr Gibson. It's all nonsense of course. I bet the IMF had stealthed ports too

Who are you talking too, and what are you going on about?

In reply to a post by Tox_Laximus:

Who are you talking too, and what are you going on about?

You quoted from Steve Gibson's site. If you're happy, that's fine.

In reply to a post by BatBoy:

In reply to a post by Tox_Laximus:

Who are you talking too, and what are you going on about?

You quoted from Steve Gibson's site. If you're happy, that's fine.

He seems to know what he's talking about, but there might be a way into sky's routers though the upgrade process.

In reply to a post by Tox_Laximus:

In reply to a post by BatBoy:

In reply to a post by Tox_Laximus:

Who are you talking too, and what are you going on about?

You quoted from Steve Gibson's site. If you're happy, that's fine.

He seems to know what he's talking about, but there might be a way into sky's routers though the upgrade process.

He is nothing more than a snake oil salesman, who is quite happy to talk absolute 'sphericals' if it suits him.

If you want your connection to work correctly, don't disable 'respond to ping'.

In reply to a post by Tox_Laximus:

So a lot of people don't know about this and broadcast their presence, this makes it even better for me

Not really. Steve Gibson's site was designed for the US where both cable and DSL providers give modems with ethernet sockets (sometimes USB). Many people just plugged in their PC without configuring anything (back in the Windows 98 and ME days) and never knew about security.

In the UK generally people moved to routers pretty quickly.

Steve's tests are testing your router on Sky, and since your router has no NETBIOS functionality (the legacy windows way of sharing files/printers) then its not really a valid test anymore...