ICMP 8 OPEN

[Jim Cheetham]

On Oct 24, 2004, at 8:05 AM, Christoph Fuchs wrote:
> Warty Warthog wrote:
>> http://scan.sygate.com/quickscan.html when I scan my
>> Ubuntu box I get the following error:
>> Protocol  Type  Status      Additional Information
>>  ICMP      8     OPEN    An ICMP ping request is
>
> This is nothing to scare about - it only shows that sygate didn't 
> understand how ICMP works.
>
Well, strictly speaking, sygate are correct to raise it was a warning, 
for the most paranoid. It is possible to use data returned from ping to 
work out what sort of operating system you are using, which can be 
valuable information for a hacker.

However, it is a corner case - in the real world, if you're not a 
windows PC, the script kiddies can't do much to you. The more advanced 
attackers can, but as a Ubuntu system isn't running any network 
services by default there are very few ways in :-)

-jim