Breakin attempts

[Tim]

On Wed, 2010-04-21 at 18:03 -0430, Patrick O'Callaghan wrote:
> while not replying to Pings may go some way to do so by hiding the IP
> address from the less sophisticated attacker.

And only from them.  There's a difference between pinging an address
that doesn't reply back, and pinging an address that's not currently
connected to something.  The slightly clueful will know that.

I'll make an educated guess that someone trying to hack any and everyone
they can, won't bother pinging *then* attacking the responders, but will
simply try to connect to each IP in a range, dealing only with the
responses to the connection attempts (be they telnet, SSH, FTP, HTTP,
SMTP, POP, IMAP, or any other number of protocols).

Why bother pinging?  The ping doesn't help you break into the other
protocol.

-- 
[tim at localhost ~]$ uname -r
2.6.27.25-78.2.56.fc9.i686

Don't send private replies to my address, the mailbox is ignored.  I
read messages from the public lists.