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Re: Slashdot: UK ISP PlusNet Testing Carrier-Grade NAT Instead of IPv6


From: Valdis.Kletnieks () vt edu
Date: Fri, 18 Jan 2013 14:44:43 -0500

On Thu, 17 Jan 2013 18:21:28 -0500, William Herrin said:

Then it's a firewall that mildly enhances protection by obstructing
90% of the port scanning attacks which happen against your computer.
It's a free country so you're welcome to believe that the presence or
absence of NAT has no impact on the probability of a given machine
being compromised. Of course, you're also welcome to join the flat
earth society. As for me, the causative relationship between the rise
of the "DSL router" implementing negligible security except NAT and
the fall of port scanning as a credible attack vector seems blatant
enough.

Oddly enough, the drop in portscanning attacks maps even more closely
to the shipping of XP SP2, which turned on the onboard firewall by
default.  Remember that some of the really big worm hits were when
they managed to get loose inside corporate networks behind the NAT...

Also, a NAT doesn't stop a Java or Adobe exploit in the least, as anybody
with security clue will tell you....

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