What tangible security are gained by blocking all but a few outgoing ports in a firewall
- by Frankie Dintino
Our current hardware firewall allows for blocking incoming and outgoing ports. We have two possibilities:
Block certain troublesome ports (unsecured smtp, bittorrent, etc.)
Block all but a few approved ports (http, https, ssh, imap-ssl, etc.)
I see several downsides with option 2. Occasionally web servers are hosted on non-standard ports and we would have to deal with the resulting issues. Also, there is nothing preventing a malicious or unwanted service from being hosted on port 80, for instance. What are are the upsides?