GRC Shields Up?

Question

I was using this service to Check My Ports For XBC

It uses port 8602

Shields up says this port is stealth

Does that mean connections will be refused through this port?

Answer 1

The fact that your port is in stealth mode is a good thing. It means that random pinging by hackers should leave your computer protected by your firewall. But if a legitimate application needs to access the port it should have no problem doing so because most firewalls will do a "stateful packet inspection."

Simply put, when data needs access to your computer, the firewall looks at the source and destination IP addresses, the source and destination ports and the sequence numbers to decide if the packet belongs to a current open connection. If the answer is yes, the data will be allowed access. The GRC site and other independent firewall sites have more info about this procedure.

http://www.grc.com/su-firewalls.htm

http://www.firewall-software.com/firewal...

If by some chance you experience problems, you can manually open ports. Using Windows XP built in firewall as an example, this Microsoft article explains how to accomplish this.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/308127

If you're using a 3rd party firewall like Zone Alarm or Comodo for example, they will have specific instructions (usually in their FAQs or readme.txt file)  on how to open ports.

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