Wed Mar 30 17:16:27 PST 2005 — Sonic.net announces firewalling for DSL connections.
I am happy to announce that Sonic.net will be providing firewall protection for DSL connections, beginning on April 12th, about two weeks from now. There are more and more threats to computers which are coming from the Internet, so I’m very pleased that we’re launching this exciting new feature for Sonic.net DSL customers!
Firewalling helps protect your systems from various Internet threats, including worms, viruses and spam relaying. In the next couple weeks, prior to the deployment, you are welcome to change the initial filtering level using our new DSL filtering configuration tool at: sonic.sonic.net/members/dslfilter/
Sonic.net’s DSL port firewalling features provide various levels of protection for DSL connected computers. By using one of the three levels of filtering, you can protect your systems from many common Internet threats. If you’d like to change from the default, we suggest that you to select a level of protection which is appropriate for your type of Internet usage and your understanding of system security. For most customers, the default setting will provide a good degree of protection with little or no impact on your ability to use a full range of Internet applications.
Three levels of filtering are available:
Option One: Complete Inbound TCP Firewalling. This firewall rule set prevents any inbound TCP connections from being established, protecting your system from most types of Internet attacks.
Option Two (the default, recommended by Sonic.net): Common Exploitable Port Firewalling. This is the default firewall rule set applied to DSL circuits. It blocks traffic on port 25 (SMTP email) both to and from a customers circuit to any mail servers other than Sonic.net maintained servers as well as preventing communication on ports used by common Microsoft services that are frequently exploited.
Option Three: Port 25 Firewalling. This firewall rule set only restricts traffic on port 25 (SMTP email) to and from a customers circuit to any mail servers other than sonic.net maintained servers. This is the minimum recommended rule set. This rule set generally prevents your computer from being hijacked and used to send SPAM directly to other mail servers.
Finally, we’ve always offered static IP addresses and we do welcome customers running their own servers on static IPs, so an option to turn off all filtering for those customers is available as well. We recommend that you only exercise this option if you run a mail server yourself on your DSL connection. Please do be careful with system security if you elect to turn off all filtering!
For more details on the specifics, please see our DSL Firewalling FAQ at: www.sonic.net/support/faq/advanced/dsl_firewalling.shtml
For discussions on this topic, please do read and post to the local discussion group at news://news.sonic.net/sonic.dsl
-Dane, Kelsey, Nathan, Chris, etc.