Baslinux mailing list

[Karolis Lyvens <karolisl AT gmail.com>]

On Sun, Jan 28, 2007 at 05:06:14PM +0000, sindi keesan wrote:
> This site used nmap 3.0 to probe my local IP number (which is also at the 
> end of a file /var/*/pppd.tbd as IPLOCAL) but appears to have checked out 
> all the ports at my ISP.  There was mention of the closest large city. 
> 758 are closed and it listed the others starting with systat and netstat.

Then I guess that you have an internal IP. I.E., you're behind Network
Address Translating router, which masks your internal IP. Because
the external IP which is seen by external hosts from the Internet is
shared with many hosts at your ISP, it might be hard to connect to your
computer from outside (when connecting/port scanning your external IP,
you'll connect/port-scan ISP's router instead of your box).

This is speculation, since I don't know your exact ISP setup.

> I could not interpret the results.

You could copy+paste them here

> The other tests were for scanning various servers.

They might be useful if you are trying to test whether your
telnet/ftp/ssh/smtp/etc server is accesible from outside

> This discussion reminds me of being told to never wear a used bike helmet 
> because it might have microscopic cracks.  We have the old Bell style, 
> with a thick heavy white plastic shell instead of a decorative colored 
> nylon or thin plastic layer, that would hold the styrofoam together even 
> if it did crack.  It might not be possible to crack BL if you don't remove 
> the plastic coating of not running servers other than X.

Probably. Trying to crack BL from outside is a bit like trying to crack
a DOS box from internet (doesn't run any services by default, isn't
connected all the time, etc).

It may be possible to exploit client-side security flaws/holes (like
bugs in Opera or pmail), but that requires:
1. A malicious server that one has to connect to (voluntarily)
2. That server must have an exploit suitable for the client and specific
   client's version
3. If it actually *succeeds* exploiting the client, then, it must deal
   with hostile, inhospitable and nonstandard enviroment :) (nonstandard
   libraries, lack of many usual ones, absence of most usual utilities,
   Busybox, ash, uClibc, and, finally, 2.2 kernel)


Karolis