My question has to do with wireless hot spots and stealth ports security?

At one hot spot "GRC's Shields Up" reports all my ports are in stealth mode and my firewall activity report has only a few "in and out" activities. The final GRC report says my security is very good. At another hot spot, and without making any changes to my computer, the report says all ports are closed except a few. My firewall activity report shows several "in and out" activities per second. The final GRC report at that spot is very poor security. Can any firewalls configure my computer to have stealth mode ports all the time?

My question has to do with wireless hot spots and stealth ports security?network

First a bit of clarification - ports can have three states: Open, closed, or stealth.

- In case of open port, an application will respond to a request on a specific port by acknowledging a connection request. A web server would be listening on port 80 and waiting/responding to requests.

- For a closed port, an application (or OS) will respond with a denial of connection. (ICMP 鈥減ort unreachable鈥?

- A stealth port will not respond at all, be it open or closed behind the "stealth" status.

As you can see the "stealth" mode of a machine's ports are independent of the requestor.

Most software based firewalls and definitely hardware firewalls can be configured to not respond to requests.

Since I do not provide what firewall you are using, I am unable to provide you step-by-step instructions.

A personal opinion - stealth ports are overhyped as far as security goes.

Ports do not respond in two states - 1. The machine is off, 2. the port is in stealth mode. (third state is when the system or application crashed)

If the system can 'see' the IP address, it is clear the machine is on. No targeted attack will be fooled by stealth port. If it is an opportunistic attack, then a "closed" port would do just as well.