Its not a matter of believing Steve or not. Its objective technical facts and I agree 
with Steve's interpretation of these facts.
Regarding Steve's understanding of IDS: your arguments are personal and not technical 
(reminds me political discussions). I think that I understand architecture and 
security and in my opinion NIDS can't detect most professional attacks by 
cyber-criminals. The reason: NIDS scanning for signatures is not related to content 
format and context.

Mike 


On Tue, 29 January 2002, "Kevin Brown" wrote:

> 
> BlackICE is a robust and useful personal FW/IDS.  The IDS sigs are more
> robust than the logging features offered by other personal FW vendors.  With
> the recent changes they've made over the last year or so, you can crank the
> security level up and open up specific ports, rather than lowering your
> security settings so some apps will work.  Also, you can add and remove
> individual IPs or entire subnets.  This ultimately gives you much more
> flexibility for Internet facing PCs.
> 
> It does not do outbound blocking like Tiny or Zone Alarm.  This is a
> complaint many people have, but I find that to be a more annoying than
> useful feature anyway.  And it's important to understand the nature of IDS
> before freaking out over what you see in your logs.  Many people claim that
> BI overreacts with all the alerts, but if you don't worry over every port
> scan, it shouldn't bother you.
> 
> Other negatives are that you can't turn off any of the sigs (for repeated
> false positives).  And some sigs are a little vague in their description, so
> it won't tell you the difference between a Code Red or a Nimda scan for
> example, but you probably don't need that much granularity for a personal FW
> anyway.  At that point you'd probably want a dedicated IDS system.
> 
> FYI, don't believe anything Steve Gibson says about the software
> (www.grc.com).  He has no idea what an IDS is and therefore has no idea how
> to use BI.
> 
> Brownfox
> 
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: garren [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
> Sent: Tuesday, January 29, 2002 1:41 AM
> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Subject: Feedback on BlackICE...
> 
> 
> Hi all,
> 
>     I am looking at BlackICE and wondering if anyone has good/bad feedback on
> the tool. Do you think it does a good job of the combined Firewall/IDS/etc
> security that it claims it does? I have it installed and running and it has
> caught a few port scans and a DoS on my system but that could be just window
> dressing.
> 
>     Feedback is a good think... looking forward to yours.
> 
> Cheers...


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