Bitdefender 2018 blocking incoming PINGs

Steve Pitts

Folks,

The three PCs on my network that have upgraded themselves to Bitdefender Total Security 2018 (v22.0.12.161 currently) now fail to respond to PINGs within the local network whereas they did respond before the upgrade, as do the couple of others that have yet to upgrade and are still running the 2017 version. The network adapters are defined as either Dynamic or Home/Office and stealth is turned off.

If I turn off the firewall on a given machine then it starts responding to PINGs again but obviously that is not a good solution. Experimentation has also led me to discover that creating an all applications rule allowing ICMP traffic also resurrects the PING responses but that feels like a potentially dangerous sledgehammer with which to crack this particular nut.

My questions therefore are threefold:

1. is there a setting that I can change that will enable PINGs within the local network??

2. is there a log file I can use to check which parts of the target system are being blocked from responding to ICMP packets so that I can create more specific application rules to enable the ICMP traffic??

3. if there is no such log, then how do I identify which programs need those rules so that I can get rid of the all applications rule??

FWIW I use the ping capability quite a bit to determine whether another system on the network is up and running before attempting to use a share on it, so this change in behaviour has broken a number of standard processes for me.

Cheers, Steve

netmon

Maybe disabled due to network STEALTH mode? Try Protection {B shield icon} > View Features > Firewall: Settings {gear icon} > Stealth Mode: Edit Stealth settings > Turn Off

Steve Pitts

Netmon, nice idea but I did say in my original post that stealth was off.

netmon

Sorry, I missed that. I think you just found a defect. I'm a user so assumed STEALTH would be the correct setting, but had not actually tested my setup. Actually what you need to do (and I just tested this) is turn STEALTH mode off *and* also set the firewall default application behavior to ALLOW. Which seems to me that it defeats the purpose of the firewall.

Stealth mode off and:

Protection {B shield icon} > View Features > Firewall: Settings {gear icon} > Default Application Behavior:  Edit default rules > (select network interface) > Select "Allow"

/index.php?/profile/201429-sorin-g/&do=hovercard" data-mentionid="201429" href="<___base_url___>/index.php?/profile/201429-sorin-g/" rel="">@Sorin G. This appears to be a defect. STEALTH mode off should allow response to ICMP pings. Especially because under firewall rules you cannot create an ICMP rule like you can do with many firewalls. The only protocols the Bitdefender firewall custom rules section allows are ANY, TCP and UDP.