Is my computer safe enough if I use just iptables?

[Botond Kardos]

On Fri, 2004-10-15 at 13:32, VJ wrote:

> Hi,
>   I have firewall script using iptables which runs from
> /etc/rc.d/rc.local. This script does nothing except allowing just http,
> smtp for outer world(inbound). All type of connections are allowed from
> the machine to the outerworld (outbound). I have not set anything else
> like in hosts.deny/hosts.allow or sshd.conf.
>   My question is, according to your knowledge, is my computer safe enough?
> Till now I have not suffered from any proble, but this cannot go on
> for-ever.
> 
> Regards from
> VJ


    I'd guess you're safe. Like some other people here on the list I use
an old Pentium machine with kernel 2.4.26 as a firewall/DSL router. It
was installed almost a year ago and of course nobody broke in yet. The
only service I run on this machine is SSH, but it uses a non-standard
port, and I never log in with passwords, only with password protected
DSA keys.
    On the other hand: how many successful hack attempts have you read
about on this list? There were only a couple SSH brute force trials
reported. So you can expect something like this, not more.
    Cheers,
    Botond

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listman.redhat.com/archives/fedora-list/attachments/20041018/31f47912/attachment-0001.htm>