A challenge (was Re: Default security functions on an IPv6 CPE)

[Mikael Abrahamsson]

On Wed, 18 May 2011, Mark Smith wrote:

> What saved your smartphone from being hacked?

I have information supporting both sides of the discussion:

My employer does not do any major firewalling towards mobile customers in 
most countries, and the users are handed a globally unique IPv4 address, 
thus is perfectly reachable from everywhere with all devices. No major 
hackery reported.

Otoh I've read articles about jailbroken iphones where the jailbreak 
software installs a ssh server on the device, and people do not change the 
default pw and there has been software written to mass-hack these devices.

One could make the argument that a firewall would not help because a 
properly written ssh server would use the firewall API to open up ingress 
tcp/22 towards its service if it now wants to be reachable.

Let's just face it, there is no right or wrong here... Only time will tell 
what works best.