why are Esat BT attacking me?

flogen

My Firewall just reported an attack on my pc and when I checked it out it traced it as coming from Esat BT, Grand Plaza, Dublin 4........
Is this a new technique at getting customers? are they going to remotely switch my phoneline connection over from Eircom or something?

Flogen

Agent Smith

i guess some guy was bored.....



i used to do it all the time, ping people and wait for them to ping me back





the devil makes work for idel hands

flogen

actually, now that you mention it... what does ping mean? my computer lingo is only what I need to know, and 'ping' is something Ive noticed afew times

Flogen

Snaga

ping is a tool used to check connectivity between two hosts (computers on a network(in this case, the internet!)).

At its most basic level I will send a certain amount of data to another machine, and it will send an echo of it back. My machine will measure the time between sending and receiving the data and can give you an idea of the latency (speed - not bandwith) of the network path between me and the other machine.

Its mostly harmless as it uses such small amounts of data. Many personal firewalls will show it as an attack when its mostly totally benign though as there are ways to increase the size of the 'data' being sent to very large sizes and can cripple the internet connection of the receiving machine if it's connection is a lot smaller than the senders connection.

flogen

cool, thanks

Flogen

MiCr0

Originally posted by flogen
My Firewall just reported an attack on my pc and when I checked it out it traced it as coming from Esat BT, Grand Plaza, Dublin 4........
Is this a new technique at getting customers? are they going to remotely switch my phoneline connection over from Eircom or something?

Flogen

when you said attack - what do you mean?

can you post the log?

Karoma

*giggle*
also... what did you "trace" the "attack" with...? :-)

parasite

yeah my zonealarm has always blocked incoming connections from x-airlockxxx.esatclear.ie.... , yet still my net connection carries on as normal, so i assume it's not necessary for my connection, so what is it ?
i don't get it tbh

Snaga

Your seeing the connection come from Esat BT, Grand Plaza etc, because they own the ip address and that is the registered address of the company.

But the ip most likely belongs to someone using Esat BT as their ISP and could be anywhere in the country essentially.

parasite : the connections could be anything, someone bold doing a port scan on a range of ip addresses, someone infected with a virus, an automailer looking for an open relay, one of your friends on irc pinging you or running a /whois or client request, basically anything that causes data to be sent to your machine.

When you connect to the internet you open yourself up to this kind of thing, you will allways get random connects to your host for one reason or another, thats why your using a firewall in the first place, they block (or at least highlight) these random connects so you can worry less about them (you should never stop worrying alltogether )

Of course it usually has the opposite effect as people are often quite surprised at the amount of connection attempts they receive when online.

Cabaal

Originally posted by flogen
actually, now that you mention it... what does ping mean? my computer lingo is only what I need to know, and 'ping' is something Ive noticed afew times

Just a suggestion, something that might come in handy for you in future if you take a look at www.whatis.com its a good site for explaining techie terms such as ping

Might come in handy in future

_sheep

Project 1: Its time

strat

ohh man your getting pings? looks like your only option is to

voxpop

i thought esat were blocking pings for all their broadband users ???

zoro

Originally posted by Angry_Penguin
i thought esat were blocking pings for all their broadband users ???

yeah i thouht that too ... but recently I've been able to ping address with no trouble what so ever .

when i first signed up to iol i saw that when u ping from the command line, you get a "filtered" response, that is taht iol are filtering the ping packets. but now i seem to be able to ping anywhere with no filtered messages at all! have iol dropped the ping fitering??

Daniel

strat

Originally posted by Angry_Penguin
i thought esat were blocking pings for all their broadband users ???

IOL broadband, the residential package do block icmp packets
esat business, no all unblocked

MrPinK

IOL broadband, the residential package do block icmp packets

Only outgoing. You can still ping iol IP's