1. BY OLIVIA WILSON AND BRITTANY MCDONALD Up Your Shields with Shields Up!

2. Overview What is Shields Up Services Conclusion References

3. Shields Up??? Shields Up is an online port scanning service created by Steve Gibson of Gibson Research Corporation and hosted at grc.com. Shields Up scans the most common file sharing ports. The best way to determine if your computer's (or router's) firewall is working and optimized is to effectively try to penetrate it.

4. Purpose The purpose of this utility is to alert the users of any ports that have been opened through their firewalls or through their NAT routers.(process of modifying IP address info) Browser-based utility Shields UP! tests your firewall for vulnerabilities and kinks in your computer's defense.

5. Welcome to ShieldsUp!

6. Services After you give ShieldsUP! permission to run tests on your computer and choose a test type, it looks for weaknesses and openings that hackers and intruders can use to attack your machine.

7. Services Shields up allows you to test in 5 different categories:  File Sharing  Common Ports  All Service Ports  Messenger Spam  Browser Headers

8. Services-File Sharing Shields Up attempts to contact the hidden Internet Server within your PC. According to Shields Up your own computer may be functioning as an internet server without your permission or you knowing.

9. Services-Common Ports This is where the common ports probe “attempts to establish standard TCP internet connections with a collection of standard, well known, and often vulnerable or troublesome internet ports on your computer.”

10. Services-All Service Ports The internet service ports “grid scan” determines the status of your system’s first 1056 TCP ports.  According to the site, by tradition, ports 1-1023 are generally reserved for the acceptance of incoming connections by services running on the receiving system.  Internet services listen on various standard low numbered ports found.  Due to the insecure behavior of Microsoft’s windows OS, Shields up added an additional 33 ports which brings the total to 1056.

11. Services-Messenger Spam It will send four small UDP-protocol Internet packets to port 135 of your computer, currently located at your IP address. Four packets are sent in case one or more are lost along the way.

12. Services-Browser Headers A web browser's request to a remote server may contain information about the user and the computer system running the browser. A web browser's request headers might also be modified by the request's passage through some other agent such as a privacy filter which deliberately removes potentially revealing information, or a proxy server which might add headers to identify the client on whose behalf the proxy's request is being made.

13. Downsides The only downside to this tool is the fact that there really isn’t a permission page to let you know exactly what you are getting into. You computer is looked at as soon as you get onto the website. Once you click on the link the scanning of your firewall will start. Also when scanning the ports, you as the user don’t know if your ports are completely protected since they are open during the scanning process.

14. Conclusion Even though its not really asking for your permission its still ok to figure out how a hacker will hack your computer so that you can prevent it. Shields Up help you figure that out by hacking your computer through its 5 services. The purpose of this utility; to alert the users of any ports that have been opened through their firewalls or through their NAT routers.

15. References Lifehacker.com en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shields_Up grc.com/su-explain.htm

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