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Originally posted by silver-surfer:
Did I hear someone mention Psy-Ops? There is no mention to psy-ops anywhere in this thread, allow me to assure you as psy-ops were deceased back in the late 70s. Once Sydney Gotlieb and Allister Crowley lost their handle on the CIA, psy-ops became a myth.

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I'm thinking that Silver Surfer is not completely
sure of all of the functionality built into NetBarrier X. The other programs
he mentions, Courtney and Klaxon, are "alarm" programs that watch your
network connection and look for suspicious activity and port scans. He seems
to miss the point that NetBarrier X is indeed a fully functioning firewall
running as a UNIX daemon. In addition to this NetBarrier does have a set of
features that also look for suspicious activity and can be configured to
automatically block the offender's IP address, not just warn you of the
suspected attack.

If properly configured, the firewall portion of NetBarrier can be used to
provide a very strong defense. I take it that the machine that you are
wanting to protect is your daily use computer, in this case my suggestion
would be to use the preset firewall configuration of "Client Only". This
will allow your machine to create connections to other systems, such as when
web surfing or connecting to a shared volume. But it will block incoming
connections that are not solicited. It a will also "stealth" the commonly
used ports, including the Telnet port, so that they not just appear closed,
but do not reply to attempted connections at all. You can even set it to not
reply to Ping requests, usually the first step used by hackers to determine
if a machine is up and running at the target IP address.

If you are wanting to protect a server, then NetBarrier's firewall is
completely customizable to your specific needs, allowing just the ports
necessary for the server's tasks. And it's a lot easier to use then setting
up a UNIX based firewall's text configuration files.

NetBarrier X3 will detect all TCP and ICMP NMAP scanports. The reality is
that when you have several IPs and enough time, you can set up a scanport
that scans a different single port over long time periods, such as once a
day, so that the target system won't be alerted. This is why, if you are
using an "Always On" connection like a cable modem, it is not a bad practice
to reset or power down the modem every once in a while in order to receive a
new IP address from the DHCP pool. You can check with your service provider
or network administrators about the best way to do this.

His final comment about using a *nix based system is true, Windows is
notoriously bad about handling the network and is difficult to protect
through software firewalls. The lucky thing is, Mac OS X is a UNIX based
system.

We certainly have some very security conscience customers who have qualified
NetBarrier X for use on their Mac OS X machine including the U.S. Army,
several defense contractors and security companies.

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