Pretecting and archiving data

1.What makes a firewall a good security investment? Accessing the Internet, find two or three firewall vendors. Do they provide hardware, software or both?


Ince (2005) notes that a firewall is an extra layer of protection placed around a network or around a particular application. A firewall placed around a network will usually employ a router which can be programmed to deny access to a network, for example it can be programmed to deny access to any packets of data which have been sent to a particular dedicated port. The following diagram illustrates the operation of a simple firewall.Figure 1 A Simple Firewall (Ince 2005 Fig. 11.2)

My firm employs Check Point and WatchGuard as the firewalls for different sites. I myself installed Norton 360 developed by Symantec Corporation on my home machines, which also has the firewall facility. These three firewall products can possibly meet the needs of users from different markets. Check Point is very popular software firewall for enterprises and WatchGuard is a hardware firewall welcomed by SMEs. Norton 360 is a home anti-virus software that also acquires the personal firewall.

2.Find out if your university or workplace has a backup policy in place. Is it followed and enforced?

My firm certainly has a backup policy which is thoroughly implemented. It has multiple backup devices including magnetic tapes and optical disks. They just barely meet our needs and are still manageable. Apart from that, everyday we used up a few backup tapes and optical disks and as time gone by we have accumulated a huge volume of them. Therefore, the metadata of tapes and disks are getting more and more important, which highly affects the recovery process. We all know that the recovery of data is very time consuming and never an easy task. However, we are usually required to fulfil the requests from users with a tight time frame. As a result, this is crucial to implement an effective backup and recovery solution with holistic view.

3.Most of the antivirus software perform an active scanning of the user activity on the Internet, detecting downloads and attachments in e-mails. Hackers have readily available resources to create new viruses. How easy is it to find a virus writing kit?

From the given website, it doesn't take long for someone to create a virus. I just recall what happened about 9 to10 years ago. The 'ILOVEYOU' virus successfully attacked tens and thousands of computers around the world. It created super email storms over the networks in order to give denial-of-service (Dos) attacks to email services. The virus wass actually a simple VB program. After we had analysed the source code of the program, my colleague worked out a solution within 24 hours. The solution was to cheat the virus that the machine had got infected and therefore, it would not execute itself. How? The infected machine would have been inserted a registry key by 'ILOVEYOU' and the virus only attacked the computers wiithout this key. We inserted this key to all computers on the network as a 'vaccine'. According to Wikipedia (2009), 'ILOVEYOU' infected10 percent of all computers connected to the Internet.

References

Ince, D 2004, Developing distributed and e-commerce applications, 2nd edn, Harlow, Essex, UK: Addison – Wesley, pp. 321-322

Wikipedia 2009, ILOVEYOU, Wikipedia, The free encyclopedia, last modified 28 May 2009, Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., US, viewed 12 June, <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ILOVEYOU>.