Friday, October 05, 2007

How Exposed in Public Cellular IP

One of the concerns about having a PUBLIC IP address for cellular is your exposure to public hackers probing public IPs for services. In theory, you pay for all of these attempts since the mobile IP system encapsulates and transports them all on your behalf.

I'm happy to report that after logging such attempts for many months my cellular devices receive less than 4 probes in any one day and likely under 20 total per month. So many days pass with no probes at all and it appears to stay under 2-3K per month. This compares to perhaps 200 probes per day on my DSL router/firewall.

I am not sure why the difference, although I'd guess it has to do with the high initial latency in contacting a cellular IP. So any "script-kiddie" tool scanning IP address ranges probably is not willing to wait up to 5 seconds for cellular devices on busy towers which need "unparking" to respond.

What kinds of probes are they? Mainly those looking for MS-SQL servers, with a rare access to FTP and the remainder of accesses aimed to seemingly random, unnamed ports - likely associated with trojans or zombie networks.