Secure Anon Proxies

jayneemac

hi, please excuse my ignorance...

i've started experimenting with anonymous proxies lately (yea i know what your thinking ) but i'm a bit confused about security.

i'm running firefox with a firewall (agnitum outpost) without any proxy settings & when i run "Shield's UP!" at www.grc.com all ports are either closed or stealth.
this is what i should be aiming for of course but my real proxy is displayed.

when i repeat the above with an anon proxy the test fails with the following ports open: SSH, Telnet, HTTP & HTTPS

am i correct in thinking that these are the proxy's ports that are open & i don't need to worry about my pc being vulnerable to attack or theft of my private info?

any suggestions or tips would be appreciated

JohnK

If your going through a proxy that doesn't report your real IP then any ports that are seen as open are on the proxy side, not yours. If the proxy reports your real IP (Ie. then its not a real anon proxy) then its possible that any firewall check would test your real IP rather than the proxy IP means that you will encounter issues eith autentication.

jayneemac

JohnK wrote:

If your going through a proxy that doesn't report your real IP then any ports that are seen as open are on the proxy side, not yours.

Thats what i thought, thanks JohnK

edanto

I've got a question about GRC shields up that is a little related to this thread - just nothing to do with anonymous proxies.

When I scan a friends computer with the GRC service, it reports all ports as closed or stealth, except post 443, https, which is open. Is this a big vulnerability? Or is it absolutely fine?

NutJob

edanto wrote:

When I scan a friends computer with the GRC service, it reports all ports as closed or stealth, except post 443, https, which is open. Is this a big vulnerability? Or is it absolutely fine?

Vulnerability unlikely(taking a vulnerability as a means of compromising a network or computer therein). But its a little hard to answer without knowing what exactly is running on the port.

For example if 443 was being used by your router for remote management with a default password that wouldn't be good.

Worth investigating and figuring out is the service needed and if not simply disable it.

edanto

Thanks - you were dead right, that's exactly what it is being used for, remote management. The password is reasonable secure, a big long randomly generated string.

thanks