alt Hacker News> If anything, NAT has saved millions of wildly insecure devices running unpatched old Windows versions from getting pwned the second they connect to the open internet.
Its definitely the opposite. People started ignoring security because its "natted" anyways, even though NAT was never supposed to be security-critical. Thats what firewalls are for.
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icedchai • yesterday at 7:22 PM
The typical NAT implementation ("PAT", single public IP, RFC-1918 network) gives you an implicit stateful firewall denying unsoliticed inbound traffic. Most people don't need anything else.
People (by which I mean average computer users) didn't "start ignoring security", they never bothered to unignore it in the first place. Early Windows editions didn't even ship with a firewall at all, people were rawdogging the internet out of the box without ever stopping to consider the consequences.