I have several firewall products that I have used over the years. I really love the product I have running with my webserver but it was never marketed for the average user and I will nor disclose the vendor. On the other hand my laptop that I travel with I use a more user friendly firewall “ZoneAlarm” it serves basic needs and does a pretty decent job. I enhance that firewall by following a stringent regimen of backing up my critical data each week to a Raid II compliant server with redundant drives that is behind a physical and software firewall. While I travel I offload critical data to a portable firewire drive. As you can tell I care about my data.
But I have gotten a bit sick of all of the attacks that hit my machines on a constant basis. Most of the time I have no choice but to ignore it unless the violator is persistent. So I have always wanted a way to let that intruder know that someone is at home and not sleeping on the switch. Well Shell Extension City has a review of a product that may be what I have been looking for it is called “SLAP” and just as the name implies it is a way to SLAP your intruder back. There are of course legal ramifications to using such a program as you could have a finger pointed at you saying hey your scanning or trying to hack a system. But with good log files you should be justified in using the program. But the legal dilemma remains what do you think? [Security Software]
SLAP seems like a very bad idea.
1) A good firewall makes you invisible. By sending packets back, you’re not invisible anymore.
2) The intruder is adding unnecessary network traffic. By SLAPing them back, your doing the same. Two wrongs do not make a right.
3) If the intruder knows what they are doing, they probably have obfuscated their true IP address. So the person you SLAP back, may not really be the trouble maker.
Side Note: You used the term “hacker” when you should have used the term “cracker”. Read about the term hacker
Thank You.