how secure is my pc/web connection

[kumarsena]

just wondering, came to think of it as i saw my ip address today and used that in the explorer address bar. if i dont have a firewall how secure is my connection to the internet, say one of u nice people got hold of my ip. would that mean accecss to my web server root. as i said i tried my own ip adn it gave a dir listing. so would anyone else be able to do teh same. and with the ip can anyone actually get access to other part of my system, and not only the server root....

thanks for any explanation...
kumar

[Fenceman]

Without a firewall you're pretty much open to whatever attacks someone decides to throw your way. I'm guessing that you probably haven't hardened your OS either. At somepoint you'll be subjected to a vulnerability scan and someone will most likely find a way to gain access to your web server. Not a good situation to be in.

[dwilson]

Running a firewall is your best bet.

If you don't want to spend the money, then at a minimum, turn off services you're not using.

Turn off your HTTP server (that's what brought up an index, right?). If you're developing against your local HTTP server, configure it to respond only to a local address -- a 192.168.. address if you've got an internal network, 127.0.0.1 (loopback) if it's the only machine.

Turn off your FTP server if you're running one.

This applies if you're running Windows ... either turn off file sharing or put file-level permissions on everything and restrict them to a very few secure usernames.

hope this helps

[kumarsena]

thanks