Firewalls and Internet Security

We are all aware of the threat of virus infection and the damage it can do. To a lesser extent many business people are concerned with spyware, and intrusion detection. The fact is that spyware is a more dangerous threat then viruses today. Intrusion or “hacking” as it is known is indeed a problem, but largely misunderstood. The point of these articles is to show you some of the solutions we recommend to protect against these problems without creating a new problem.

Firewalls

We often see people using firewall software and many of these people believe that the firewall will protect them against viruses and or spyware. The truth is these three threats are distinctly different and must be treated with appropriate measures that address each threat separately. While several companies offer software that they claim is an all in one solution, these are actually suites of software packages that have separate elements to address each issue. For example Norton Internet Security is actually a software firewall, antivirus software and antispyware software rolled into a single interface to which they’ve added parental controls and other utilities.

At The Village Geek, we do not recommend these suites for business use. Specifically we do not recommend software firewalls. The firewall software is at best feeble, and frankly you will spend more IT dollars (or more of your own time) getting the software configured to allow you to go about your business without inferring with your work.

Any Hacker worth the name will defeat a software firewall in seconds. The only way to protect you from intrusion is with a hardware firewall. There are a lot of hardware firewalls available and for home use many of the basic router/modem/firewall combinations are good enough. For business use, we recommend a Cisco firewall. This state of the art hardware firewall will stop all but the most qualified Hacker, and in truth if the Hacker is that good, you will not stop them at all. The Cisco starts at around $400 and is a bargain considering the damage a high school kid can do to your business if you are unprotected.

The Cisco device can be configured for VPN access to your network without the need for an expensive server. This feature alone is worth the price.

Spyware and Viruses

Spyware and viruses are two different things. These days spyware has evolved into something commonly called malware which includes worms and Trojans and other threats that might have been considered viruses in the past, the lines have definitely become blurry. The problem is, that the tradition method of detecting a virus is not compatible with spyware detection, and visa versa.

These threats must be managed with software, and there are software packages that contain a centralized console for managing both threats. The problem with these packages is that most of the popular ones include the software firewall, and if you turn off the firewall the software packages continually hound you with pop ups and warnings that rival the spyware you are trying to prevent.

We recommend antivirus software with built in spyware protection. We seen that these programs give excellent protection without the bulky waste of the more popular programs (memory hogs) and with out constantly interupting your work pace.