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Windows OS, Services and Apps: Network Connection Target Hosts (2021)

helgeklein.com

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Re: Windows OS, Services and Apps: Network Connection Target Hosts (2021)

#22
post #8
post #3

Is there any way to block connection to these sites with DNS or something?

Henry++ Simplewall https://www.henrypp.org/product/simplewall

This looks neat, I'll check it out.

I'm currently using Binisoft (now Malware Bytes) Windows Firewall Control to block unwanted traffic. I'm quite happy with it.

The amount of traffic that it regularly blocks is insane. Windows and installed apps constantly want to chat with their cloud friends.

Re: Windows OS, Services and Apps: Network Connection Target Hosts (2021)

#23
Steps to mitigate:

Change Windows Firewall settings to block outbound connections by default [0]

Install Unbound [1] so you can actually see the DNS requests (and block them if you want it) your system performs.

    server:
        verbosity: 1
        extended-statistics: yes

    logfile: "C:\Shares\Public\Progs\Unbound\unbound.log"

    server:
        log-queries: yes
        log-replies: yes
        log-servfail: yes
        val-log-level: 2
[0] https://imgur.com/a/ayq5yiF

[1] https://www.nlnetlabs.nl/projects/unbound/about/

Re: Windows OS, Services and Apps: Network Connection Target Hosts (2021)

#25

Is there a pihole list or something ?

These list contain most MS spyware domains, I think: https://github.com/crazy-max/WindowsSpyBlocker/tree/master/d...

Be careful, though, it's easy to accidentally break Windows Update.

Re: Windows OS, Services and Apps: Network Connection Target Hosts (2021)

#26

There seems to be some degree of overcounting in the reported figures: the number of “hosts” is the number of unique hostnames in the table, but the number of “IPs” is a straightforward sum of IP address counts that the table segregates by service, and I refuse to believe that ( e.g. ) the IP address of login.live.com as resolved by OneDrive is always different from same as resolved by Skype. $ curl -fsSL 'https://he…

> DigiCert’s OCSP service

A weakness of the OCSP protocol is that it gets sent the certificate hash as an input. This means that to a significant degree, an OCSP provider can track what software you are using, what sites you visit, etc... For the code signing certificates, they could also determine which year (or two) it came from.

DigiCert could sell that to marketing companies, and spy agencies / state-sponsored hacking groups could use it to determine if you are running vulnerable versions of software they have hacks for.

There would be ways to fix the protocol to be less vulnerable to this, but I'm sure you'll find that any such suggestion would be rejected by the major players like DigiCert in a strangely forceful manner.

Re: Windows OS, Services and Apps: Network Connection Target Hosts (2021)

#27
I read a lot of comments here wanting to block the connections, but wouldn’t be easier/better to switch to an OS that doesn’t spy you? The answers possibly is no, because they might use X or Y that requires them to use Windows, so a better question is, what holds you back to switch to Linux? (macOS also talks to a lot of servers and collect telemetry as Windows, maybe in a different scale, so isn’t an alternative if you are worried about your data being collected).

I personally prefer Linux, but what’s holding me are the streaming services (netflix, amazon, etc), I can only watch SD content if I’m on Linux, so my second opinion is macOS, I can watch at least in a decent resolution and also their notebooks are the best ones out there (the air is amazing between price, performance and battery life) for my use case, that’s also work.

Re: Windows OS, Services and Apps: Network Connection Target Hosts (2021)

#29
post #10

Anyone feeling tempted to play the Devil’s advocate here? :)

IP address and domain name count mean nothing. Why would you care if windows pinged 1 Microsoft domain vs 20,000. If they are all controlled by the same entity and send the same data, these numbers mean nothing.

Re: Windows OS, Services and Apps: Network Connection Target Hosts (2021)

#30
post #3

Is there any way to block connection to these sites with DNS or something?

Install free Comodo Internet Security. Disable DNS cache service so that all your apps resolve DNS themselves (can only be done via the registry, change the service's startup type from 2 (auto) to 4 (disabled)). In CIS, create a new group for all files under c:/windows. Create a rule denying all in/out requests to that group. Create a rule allowing only DHCP and NTP requests (255.255.255.255:67 and :123) for svchost.…

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