Latest Firewall News

A security rule base that evolves over several years has the characteristics of spaghetti
posted on 29/05/2009

Three years ago I bought a house in the south of Italy and since then I have been trying to immerse myself in the local culture. It recently occurred to me that actually there was a great deal of similarity between the nuances and national characteristics of Italy and the challenges faced by security professionals today. A rule base that has evolved over several years with several vendors’ products and many different security administrators will certainly resemble the characteristics of spaghetti. When you start pulling on one end you never know what the consequences are. Even in the south of Italy companies now-a-days need to improve the efficiency of their firewall operation and make what they have go faster and further as budget for hardware or software upgrades are under close scrutiny. The ability to understand which rules are most frequently used, enable the security professional to improve performance by ensuring a close match between rule ranking and rule usage. This is even ... [more]

SecureSphere can quarantine user accounts in the event of a security policy violation
posted on 28/05/2009

The current economic recession is straining employee-employer loyalties and raising the threat that insiders may abuse their data access privileges. Earlier this month, the former IT director for a nonprofit organ and tissue donation center pleaded guilty to a charge that she broke into the organization’s computer network and deleted organ donation database records, invoice files, and database and accounting software. These types of incidents reinforce the need for database activity monitoring that is divorced from the server so it can not be disabled, and spans all user groups, including those with elevated privileges like database administrators. Imperva® has announced new insider abuse protection capabilities for its SecureSphere Data Security Suite and Database Firewall solutions. In addition to its existing network-based monitoring and blocking of unauthorized activity by trusted insiders, SecureSphere can now terminate local user activity and quarantine user accounts in the ... [more]

Most IT professionals believe their corporate firewall base rules are in a mess
posted on 27/05/2009

According to a survey conducted by Tufin Technologies, if you are unlucky enough to suffer a major security failure during the last 5 minutes of a major football match like tonight’s UEFA champions league, 39% of IT professionals say the problem will have to wait until the footie is over! On the flip side that does leave an incredibly loyal 61% who would right their company’s IT problems before watching the footie. The survey was commissioned to find out attitudes into “Firewall Management & the Security Implications” and focused the survey at mainly IT security managers and technical staff from multinational organisations and government departments employing 1000 to 5000+. The key finding of the survey has found that 51% of IT professionals believe their corporate firewall base rules are in a mess. The survey also found that 1 in 5 IT professionals admit that either they or a colleague has cheated to get an audit passed and a staggering 9% have avoided having any audit conducted on... [more]

Adding identity and application control to the network
posted on 22/05/2009

Networks today are blind. As analyst firms such as Gartner have pointed out, IT doesn’t really know which users are on the network. Similarly, IT knows very little about the application traffic on the LAN. IT relies on cryptic tools to stand in for user and application data, but these tools can rarely be used to tie the information back to real-time traffic. But if networks have been blind to users and applications for a long time, why is this black hole a problem now? Changes in business practices have changed the risk dramatically. Organizations now host far more people, many of them “outsiders” just visiting, and users are increasingly bringing in more and more applications all the time. Realistically, businesses need these changes for the productivity gains they enable. Companies need to work with partners and contractors to complete projects efficiently, and often new applications drive new levels of collaboration amongst employees. So the key is for IT to allow these fruitful pr... [more]

Steps to mitigate Web 2.0 security risks
posted on 14/05/2009

Love or loathe it, businesses can’t ignore the Web 2.0 phenomenon. As LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, wikis, blog sites, Flickr, music sharing and other collaborative applications have eased their way into peoples’ working lives, companies are having to work through the security implications. These applications change the way people interact, blurring the line between what’s business and what’s personal. They allow people to put more data on the public internet, where it’s easily accessible. Which means that leakage of sensitive business data is potentially a huge issue. We’ve all seen the headlines from the losses of unprotected CDs and memory sticks over the past 18 months or so. And embarrassing data breaches via Web 2.0 apps are already happening – witness the recent posting on a public blog of a controversial British political party’s member list. So, to borrow a phrase from Facebook, the writing’s on the wall. Companies need to act, to stop sensitive information leaking... [more]

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