I've used NIS for a couple of years now with excellent results and frequently do routine port scan using the Shields Up! website, which many of you are familiar with. For the first time I can recall in years, yesterday I failed the ping portion of that stealth test although it showed all my ports to be in optimum stealth status. When I immediately re-did a test a few times, I passed and assume that's due to the NIS firewall actively blocking that particular Shields Up! IP address.
How could the default setting for auto-blocking pings have changed in NIS where this might have occurred? I certainly made no such changes and frankly wouldn't know how to even if I wanted to. How can I check to see?
Two things I need to mention that recently have changed on my system: The first is I installed the recommended out-of-band MS update that made available on 21 January. The second is an update to Real Player. Both of these were done before performing the latest port scan on GRC that failed.
Secondly: For whatever reason, I had an issue with using the GUI performance function yesterday. When hitting the arrow on the screen , the GUI rotated as it normally does and took me to the performance graph for my PC but there was no arrow present for me to return to the main screen in the usual manner. Strange, huh? Had to close out the window using the "X" in the upper right corner. Hope I'm explaining this correctly as I've never seen this particular problem ever before. Within a few hours and after a few auto updates, apparently the problem was corrected and the feature has returned to normal.
Could there have been a corrupt NIS update somehow which not only affected the default blocking of pings in NIS but also affected the feature for checking performance history? I know those two shouldn't be related but it's the only thing I can think of at the moment.
BTW: Rebooted a few times and also recycled the DSL modem I've used for a couple of years (I'm not using a router) and the ping problem still exists. I realize I'm still protected as my ports are all in stealth mode due to NIS, but certainly would like to know what happened and return to having pings automatically blocked.
I'm using Vista Ultimate with IE8 and Firefox 3.6 with all the latest updates; tried the GRC test with both browsers and got the same problematic results involving the ping. My NIS 2010 version is 17.5.0.127 and I've used this version without any problems since its release.
Thanks in advance for any assistance!