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Cisco Integrated Security - Call PBM IT at (888) 233-6471A Cisco Secure Network Foundation uses many tools to keep customer information from unauthorized users inside or outside the business. Virtual private networks (VPNs) allow small offices and traveling workers to communicate with each other and their head office in complete privacy, even when using the public Internet for transport. The highest user authentication standards ensure only valid users can access the VPN network. Strong encryption technologies make the data unintelligible to anyone attempting to intercept VPN communications across a public network. Firewall and IPS at every network entry point helps stop worms, spyware, or hacker attempts from penetrating the business network to steal information. Firewalls are also useful in preventing internal users from accessing sensitive information. For example, internal firewall policies can prevent unauthorized employees from accessing finance, human resources, or accounting computers, or from viewing their traffic. Virtual LANs (VLANs) allow businesses to further segment internal communications within their organization. Sensitive financial or customer information can be placed on its own VLAN, logically separate from employee LANs. The Cisco Secure Network Foundation helps businesses meet legal requirements for the security and privacy of customer information by protecting the network from security breaches or unauthorized intruders from inside or outside the network. Cisco IronPort Email Security Appliances (1) Fight spam, viruses, and blended threats to protect organizations of all sizes with industry-leading security capabilities (2) Prevent data leaks, enforces compliance, and protects reputation and brand assets, (3) Reduces downtime, simplifies administration of corporate mail systems, and eases the technical support burden, and (4) Is currently deployed by eight of 10 largest ISPs and more than 40 percent of the world's largest enterprises netForensics solutions provide all the essential elements of an effective SIEM and log management strategy, including (1) Ongoing data collection from a broad array of network and security devices, (2) The capability to aggregate, correlate and store diverse security log data, (3) Complete visibility into security-related activities, so you always know your security and compliance posture, (4) Real-time identification of threats and patterns of suspicious activity, (5) Rapid, best-practice response guidance for security incidents, (6) Tools and reports to effectively meet your compliance requirements, and (7) Scalable architectures that ensure a low cost of ownership as you grow. In order to provide some level of separation between an organization's intranet and the Internet, firewalls have been employed. A firewall is simply a group of components that collectively form a barrier between two networks. A number of terms specific to firewalls and networking are used: (1) Bastion host. A general-purpose computer used to control access between the internal (private) network (intranet) and the Internet (or any other untrusted network). Typically, these are hosts running a flavor of the Unix operating system that has been customized in order to reduce its functionality to only what is necessary in order to support its functions. Many of the general-purpose features have been turned off, and in many cases, completely removed, in order to improve the security of the machine, (2) Router. A special purpose computer for connecting networks together. Routers also handle certain functions, such as routing , or managing the traffic on the networks they connect, (3) Access Control List (ACL). Many routers now have the ability to selectively perform their duties, based on a number of facts about a packet that comes to it. This includes things like origination address, destination address, destination service port, and so on. These can be employed to limit the sorts of packets that are allowed to come in and go out of a given network, (4) Demilitarized Zone (DMZ). The DMZ is a critical part of a firewall: it is a network that is neither part of the untrusted network, nor part of the trusted network. But, this is a network that connects the untrusted to the trusted. The importance of a DMZ is tremendous: someone who breaks into your network from the Internet should have to get through several layers in order to successfully do so. Those layers are provided by various components within the DMZ, and (4) Proxy. This is the process of having one host act in behalf of another. A host that has the ability to fetch documents from the Internet might be configured as a proxy server , and host on the intranet might be configured to be proxy clients . In this situation, when a host on the intranet wishes to fetch the web page, for example, the browser will make a connection to the proxy server, and request the given URL. The proxy server will fetch the document, and return the result to the client. In this way, all hosts on the intranet are able to access resources on the Internet without having the ability to direct talk to the Internet. Message replay involves the re-use of captured data at a later time than originally intended in order to repeat some action of benefit to the attacker: For example, the capture and replay of an instruction to transfer funds from a bank account into one under the control of an attacker. This could be foiled by confirmation of the freshness of a message. Attacks on enterprise and service provider networks are increasing at an unprecedented rate. According to security experts, attacks are no longer measured by the number of events per week, but by the number of events that occur simultaneously. To protect your customers as well as your business investments, your organization must be able to maintain network security, and to react quickly if attacked. Juniper Networks Security Assessment and Risk Mitigation service can help you reduce network vulnerabilities, prevent attacks, and mitigate the disruptions they cause. Operational Security Testing is network security testing conducted during the operational stage of data system life, that is, while the system is operating in its operational environment. The standard one-time password dictionary from RFC 1760 helps maintain backwards compatibility with the various deployed systems, however, support for hexadecimal format passwords will also be mandatory to implement. The standard might specify pass phrase quality checks for the secret pass phrase. The standard will be specified so as to eliminate any possible conflict with the Bellcore trademark on the term S/Key. Stop security attacks before they affect business continuity. Cisco ASA 5500 Series Adaptive Security Appliances provide intelligent threat defense and highly secure communications services. These solutions help organizations lower their deployment and operational costs while delivering comprehensive network security for networks of all sizes. Auditors face some challenges when reviewing router and firewall configurations. I'm going to discuss a few of them in this article. My assumption is that there is a device hardening standard in place, which points out the key elements of configuration. I am also assuming configuration review is only small, and not the most important part of audit program (design assessment, change control, access control, etc... have to be done as well). |
