ZyXEL Communications ZyWALL5UTM 4.0 User Manual

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ZyWALL 5/35/70 Series User’s Guide
Chapter 11 Firewall Screens
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11.9  Anti-Probing    
If an outside user attempts to probe an unsupported port on your ZyWALL, an ICMP response 
packet is automatically returned. This allows the outside user to know the ZyWALL exists. 
The ZyWALL supports anti-probing, which prevents the ICMP response packet from being 
sent. This keeps outsiders from discovering your ZyWALL when unsupported ports are 
probed.  
Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) is a message control and error-reporting protocol 
between a host server and a gateway to the Internet. ICMP uses Internet Protocol (IP) 
datagrams, but the messages are processed by the TCP/IP software and directly apparent to the 
application user.  
Click SECURITY, FIREWALL, then the Anti-Probing tab to open the screen.
Figure 100   Anti-Probing
The following table describes the labels in this screen.  
Table 71   Anti-Probing
LABEL
DESCRIPTION
Respond to PING 
on
The ZyWALL does not respond to any incoming Ping requests when Disable is 
selected. Select LAN to reply to incoming LAN Ping requests. Select WAN to reply 
to incoming WAN Ping requests. Select DMZ to reply to incoming DMZ Ping 
requests. Select WLAN to reply to incoming WLAN Ping requests. Otherwise 
select ALL to reply to both incoming LAN and WAN and DMZ and WLAN Ping 
requests. 
Do not respond to 
requests for 
unauthorized 
services.
Select this option to prevent hackers from finding the ZyWALL by probing for 
unused ports. If you select this option, the ZyWALL will not respond to port 
request(s) for unused ports, thus leaving the unused ports and the ZyWALL 
unseen. By default this option is not selected and the ZyWALL will reply with an 
ICMP Port Unreachable packet for a port probe on its unused UDP ports, and a 
TCP Reset packet for a port probe on its unused TCP ports. 
Note that the probing packets must first traverse the ZyWALL's firewall mechanism 
before reaching this anti-probing mechanism. Therefore if the firewall mechanism 
blocks a probing packet, the ZyWALL reacts based on the corresponding firewall 
policy to send a TCP reset packet for a blocked TCP packet or an ICMP port-
unreachable packet for a blocked UDP packets or just drop the packets without 
sending a response packet.
Apply
Click Apply to save your changes back to the ZyWALL.
Reset
Click Reset to begin configuring this screen afresh.