Ping Me Not! (Should I worry that Puppy returns pings?)

[macadavy]

I paid a visit to Steve Gibson's excellent Shields Up! port scanner: http://www.grc.com/
Puppy's firewall passed with flying colours with one exception:

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.

Need I be concerned? I tried to find documentation online at: http://projectfiles.com/firewall/config.html but the site appears to no longer exist. Since I have a newbie's healthy respect for cautions like this one:

** DO NOT ** modify anything below unless you know what you are doing!!

I thought I'd better ask someone who knows: how does one configure rc.firewall to "block, drop and ignore such ping requests"?

[Inuyasha]

http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/howto-drop ... g-packets/

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=li ... gle+Search

[PaulBx1]

See this discussion:

http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=9261

[macadavy]

Thank you both for your helpful links. Sorry if I came across as paranoid, but I have good reason to believe my brand-new Vindows Vista box has been majorly hacked: in fact hijacked & zombied. This after only about 72hrs online and despite the complimentary trial McAfee Security Suite (firewall, anti virus, anti spyware) telling me "don't worry, be happy - all is well! I won't go into details (this is a Puppy Linux forum after all!) but the good news is I have Puppy Linux!
Running from CD with save file on USB flash drive is pretty safe, Vista is barred from surfing 'till I sort things out.
If I figure out how to make the firewall solid & encrypt the save file (Puppy 2.17.1 offers this option), I'll be as close to bulletproof as is humanly possible.
Then if I can find anti virus software for Linux (is there any? they must be like Maytag repairmen, sittin' around with nuthin' to do!) I might be able to mount & clean windoze from Puppy, rooting out what I suspect is a particularly nasty rootkit.
Like a faithful St.Bernard or a Newfoundland water dog, its Puppy to the rescue!
Of course I could just blow windoze right off my hard drive (and may yet) but that would probably void my warranty, and we wouldn't want that...
More good news: Puppy just screams on this new machine!
Thanks again for helping!

[Inuyasha]

Try pinging fbi.gov. It won't work. It's not about paranoia; it's about getting people to stop screwing with your bandwidth.

[macadavy]

Tell me more, bro... (know any more good links to help edumacate me?) TIA

[Bruce B]

My router returns the ping request. I don't see an easy way around it. So why bother with Puppy? No matter what I did with it, the ping request would be returned on that IP address.

[macadavy]

Item: Boot skips right over POST. (Nothing to see here, folks, move along!)
Item: I am unable to alter the boot sequence in BIOS. (Well, why would I want to do that anyway?)
Item: Vindoze Vista insists on running cfcheck on every boot. (Whether I need it or not.)
Item: Trend Micro's excellent 'Housecall' is unavailable, I get pitched into an endless loop with error message: "Trend Micro failed to download data, would you like to try again?" (Yeah, right. BTW - your faux site looks totally hokum!)
Item: Steve G.'s skookum 'Shields up!" port scanner @ grc.com bugs out too: "that parameter is incorrect" (But hey, we know I'm just imagining things...)
Item: Vindoze Vista's 'restore' function has been completely incapacitated. (Just one more good reason to blow it off my hard drive!)
Item: All systems report 'GO'! (but my womanly intuition is screaming: "RAPE, RAPE!")
OK, so my “Danger, Will Robinson!

[Inuyasha]

My router returns the ping request. I don't see an easy way around it. So why bother with Puppy? No matter what I did with it, the ping request would be returned on that IP address.

Are you saying the fbi.gov ponged you?

[macadavy]

Inuyasha: I'm not sure what you mean by 'ponged', that's a new term for me. But no, I've no reason to believe fbi.gov did anything, my problem came before I ever went there.

[PaulBx1]

If you want to encrypt an existing pupsave, you might try this:

http://www.puppyos.net/forum/?1170535852

I don't even know if there is another way.

There are also live CDs out there specifically for repairing windows. They should already have what you need as far as virus checkers are concerned. Maybe look in distrowatch?