* Posts by Phillip Lougher

1 publicly visible post • joined 30 Jan 2009

DEC 'hacker' questions McKinnon political bandwagon

Phillip Lougher
Happy

PC's DON'T HAVE public IP's.... Really?

@ Darryl Parvin wrote "Sorry carrot-head; PC's DON'T HAVE public IP's, you can't scan for them. Only the servers that act as internet/WAN gateways do"...

Wrong actually. What you're describing is IP masquerading or NAT (network address translation), where computers inside the network are assigned a non-public IP address (typically in the 10.x.x.x. range), which is translated to the public IP address by the internet gateway.

That's not the way it used to be done, especially if your organisation has a class C or larger internet address (meaning the organisation can have 256 or more public IP addresses). Here, each PC inside the network can have a public IP address, and if the internet gateway/firewall doesn't block it (that is if there is a firewall), they can easily be scanned. This is precisely what's called lax security :-)