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Amy2005

macrumors regular
Original poster
Aug 10, 2005
237
0
North Yorkshire, England
Hi
I've been looking at my security settings and found these firewall settings (see picture) and just wondered what they did and if they were necessary or not?



Thanks, Amy :)
 

beatsme

macrumors 65816
Oct 6, 2005
1,204
2
Amy2005 said:
Hi
I've been looking at my security settings and found these firewall settings (see picture) and just wondered what they did and if they were necessary or not?



Thanks, Amy :)

UDP, without going into a lot of detail you don't care about, is a protocol that allows applications on networked computers to talk to each other. A lot of games and streaming media things use it. Link here. IMHO, it's no more of a risk to leave open than TCP/IP.

Logging...if you want to see if anyone has tried to access your network, logging would let you, provided you know what you're looking for. I personally don't bother with it.

I do have Stealth Mode clicked on my firewall. It does what it says it does, so I figured why not.

Just make sure your firewall is on. You should be fine.
 

Eraserhead

macrumors G4
Nov 3, 2005
10,434
12,250
UK
BeatsMe is totally right, I enable Stealth Mode and not the other advanced settings, I also switch on the firewall.
 

mkrishnan

Moderator emeritus
Jan 9, 2004
29,776
15
Grand Rapids, MI, USA
Just another agreement -- I block UDP (you might as well -- if any software you use suddenly stops working, you can turn it back on...) and enable stealth mode.

The way I understand it, stealth mode basically causes the computer to behave non-responsively on ports that are blocked, rather than rejecting the request. The reason this is done is that rejecting traffic is a "tell" to the potential hacker, in the sense that it allows the hacker to determine information about your computer / network. I'm not super clear on this. But I think an example would be that if you have a router that forwards certain ports to computers, and blocks others, traffic rejections can be used to determine which ports get past the router and which do not.
 

beatsme

macrumors 65816
Oct 6, 2005
1,204
2
Amy2005 said:
Thank you, i've activated the Stealth mode and the Blocking of the UDP traffic :)

alrighty...just remember:
if you've blocked UDP traffic, streaming audio (like iTunes radio, for example) may not work. So if you get a connection error, try opening UDP access before you start banging your head :)
 
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