Ping Reply: RECEIVED (FAILED) — Your system REPLIED to our Ping (ICMP Echo) requests, making it visible on the Internet. Most personal firewalls can be configured to block, drop, and ignore such ping requests in order to better hide systems from hackers. This is highly recommended since "Ping" is among the oldest and most common methods used to locate systems prior to further exploitation.


I got that from shields up on grc.com. How do i configure slackware 10 to drop ping (ICMP Echo) requests. Im running firestarter and there is no way to configure that i think. Must be something command line somehwhere?

this is a simialr thread http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...threadid=22708

although i am pretty sure that firestart will happily let you block pings itself, if you go through the wizardy UI

worked....thanks

careful how you set it up, pings are necessary for a lot of things with the Internet ... so don't block em all

also that site just trys to scare people ... pings are not a vulnerability, if your scared someone might get into your computer, then go thru and secure it the right way before trying to obscure everything

Someone care to expand on the different types of ICMP message, how some of them have sysctl options to turn off and how some of them are not a problem?

http://www.faqs.org/docs/iptables/icmptypes.html

is that work? .... for more info look at the wiki, theres a link to the RFC with specific info on what it is ... you can configure iptables to drop or reject or whatever certain icmp types, i myself block types 13-18 because i don't think anyone should need to ask me them

http://wiki.linuxquestions.org/wiki/ICMP

Some OSs uses ICMP ECHO REQUEST and ICMP ECHO REPLY for PathMTU Discovery (PMTU-D). Disabling "PING" can result in other hosts using the smallest allowable packet to communicate with you and thus significantly lower your performance while communicating to those sites.

if you want to play nice then don't disable icmp echo request, etc. But it's your choice and I never ever had any problems blocking pings.

If your isp's network is prone to bots and automated tools sweeping a netblock looking for certain ports on various machines then obviously your machine will not be a target if you block such request. You should be more concerned about blocking SYN FYN and other types of packets with thoose flags set.