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Comment by 9dev

5 days ago

Asking back, when I limit the outgoing connections from a network, why would I account for any nonstandard port and make the ruleset unwieldy, just in case someone wanted to do something clever?

A simple ruleset would only block a couple dangerous ports and leave everything else connectable. Whitelisting outgoing destination ports is more complicated and more annoying to deal with for no benefit. The only place you should be whitelisting destination ports is when you're looking at incoming connections.

  • I definitely block outgoing ports on all our servers by default; Established connections, HTTP(S), DNS, NTP, plus infra-specific rules. There is really no legitimate reason to connect to anything else. The benefit is defence against exfiltration.

    • If you're allowing direct https out, how are you stopping exfiltration?

      Maybe https is routed through a monitoring proxy, but in the situation of allowing ssh the ssh wouldn't be going though one. So I still don't see the point of restricting outgoing ports on a machine that's allowed to ssh out.

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