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Network security checklist

August 14th, 2006 · No Comments


Centuries ago, security professionals may have debated the merits of new technologies, like moats networksecurity.jpgor drawbridges for example. Today, the equipment may have changed, but the debate remains the same. Today, your network has become the castle; and instead of invading armies, the security professional is constantly besieged by twelve year olds with downloaded cracker suites and thirty-year-old entrepreneurs looking to host a new warez site.

While 100% security is hardly a possibility, there are several things that you can do to make your network more secure.

1. Ensure that your firewalls are up-to-date and properly configured.

Yes, that is firewalls, as in more than one. The most secure configuration will include, at a minimum, two firewalls between any network client and the wild, wild Web. This includes a software firewall on the system, as well as a hardware firewall in the network path.

Although it is an excellent tool, most hardware firewalls have one fatal flaw: they are designed to trust all outgoing traffic. Unfortunately, this traffic may include captured keystrokes or other unwanted data. A software firewall, properly configured, is able to distinguish unsafe traffic from benign.

Your firewall manual will go into greater detail, but as a general rule of thumb, you should start by manually allowing all inbound and outbound traffic, and setting policies to allow only the desired packets. Network security checklist

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