Is my Xbox safe from hackers viruses

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Parent Category: Frequently Asked Xbox Live Questions

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To date I have never heard of any Xbox being hacked via the internet or any Xbox being infected by a virus. But you should still take action to protect your Xbox.

No protection

Your Xbox is connected directly to your cable modem, you have no firewall protection and your Xbox IP Address can be obtained easily from the Internet and can be port scanned easily.

Medium protection

Your Xbox is connected to your PC and you are using ICS and a Firewall such as Zone alarm or Norton Personal Firewall. Your PC IP can be obtained easily from the Internet but most ports will be closed and the private IP address of your Xbox will not be available. However other methods of controlling your PC are available and security can be comprised (Trojans etc).

High protection

Your Xbox is connected to an Ethernet or ADSL Router with a SPI (State Packet Inspection) Firewall. Both your PC and Xbox are completely hidden from the Internet. All port scans are blocked at the Firewall. Only trusted traffic that has left the private network will be let back in.

But as I've said. Don’t worry too much, I don’t know of any hacking of Xboxes to date, you will hear some people mentioned DOS or DDOS attacks on the Xbox where you will end up disconnected because of an overload of traffic directed at your router which ties it up and means it could end up rebooting/disconnecting, check to see if your router has an option to prevent DDOS attacks.