Airport Router Ports Not Stealthed

I have the same problem. I was very pleased in the past to see that the whole display was green - meaning every port was stealthed. But after the update to 7.6.3 there are many blue ports - meaning they are closed.

Does anyone know why these changed? Is it possible to downgrade the firmware to get back to all green?

Thanks.

You can revert to a previous firmware version temporarily. Do that and run the test again.

I am at a loss to explain since this is what I see while running Firmware 7.6.1 on my AEBS:

I am curious to know what changes downgrading results in for you, since it made no change in the Shields Up test that I could observe.

As far as I know Apple never offered "stealth mode" for any AEBS, and the only comment I recall reading was that they were not interested in implementing the feature. Where do you find it in AirPort Utility?

Basically, as John Galt has said, the Extreme's firewall doesn't offer this functionality. You can request it here:

https://www.apple.com/feedback/

The feedback form I posted, or:

https://expresslane.apple.com/GetproductgroupList.action

But the AirPorts have never provided the "stealthed" functionality. They have always shown as "closed".

Thanks. The results I showed are also using the latest AEBS, but if you downgrade the firmware it stands to reason whatever functions you enjoyed in the past would be restored.

This is a mystery. Send Apple your feedback. They definitely read Feedback submissions, but you will not get a response, and as I wrote the last I heard was that this feature will not be implemented.

Try contacting Steve Gibson. He might have an explanation and there is a chance you will get one from him vs. none from Apple. If he does please post a follow-up.

http://www.grc.com/stevegibson.htm

Start here: http://www.grc.com/cb-faq.htm

There is a discussion forum though I do not know how active it is.

I had the same problem as you with my Airport Extreme Base station. When I was on 7.6.1, all of the service ports showed a stealth status. When I updated to 7.6.3 firmware, most of the ports reported closed instead of stealth (I would say 95% closed is a good guesstimate). I rolled back to the 7.6.1 firmware, and now the ports are back to showing stealth again. I noticed in another thread that even when you rolled back to 7.6.1 that your ports are still showing closed...not stealth. Weird.

One difference might be in my particular setup: I have set a default host IP address to a non-existent IP address (which essentially will forward all non-solicited requests to that IP address, and force a non-response to those unsolicited requests). I use this to keep my AEBS from responding to ping requests. To do this in Airport Utility, go to Network Tab, click on 'Network Options' and in the field for the default host, type in an IP address that is outside the DHCP range of addresses.

Hope this helps.

I thought I'd mention this because I've seen the confusion between the Airport firmware upgrade and loss of stealth in ShieldsUP! in a couple of threads.

Steve recently changed the way ShieldsUP! detects stealth. It now detects an ICMP Destination Ureachable returned message and, argueably correctly, interprets the port as Closed rather than Stealth.

Steve also mentioned on today's Security Now (#403) that you might see wierd results because some routers out there on may drop ICMP packets if too many are received too frequently.