Basic of Inforcomm Security (Part 2)

This is a topic covered by tonnes of network security professional. A trip to the nearby library would probably stuff with more then enough knowledge to handle your network. That is if you can absorb everything you read from the books. What i will list now here are some of the common practices.

Firewall is one of the basic need in a company network. Unless you are an network guru or some Cisco geeks, depending on your router to protect your network will not be your best bet. A firewall would normally come in default as closing all ports. That mean you will only need to open what is needed for your operation to function. Be careful not to open more then what is enough. A quick search to your existing application documentation would tell you what ports is needed and these ports are just what you need to open. Using Network address translation (NAT) is also necessary to protect your servers or application from being exposed to the external network. NAT is safe and it save you the cost of purchasing static IP.

Intrusion Prevention System (IPS)

IPS is an additional protection to the network. For company dealing to large amount of sensitive data and with the budget, IPS is definitely the way to go. As we know that conventional Firewall block unwanted attack and data from coming into the network, but we also know that Firewall ignore what that has gotten into the network! IPS scan and constantly listen to the traffic in the network. Abnormal behaviour of the network traffic and immediately detected and notification can be sent out instantly. There are some Firewall appliance that act as unified threat machine (UTM). Such machine would normally have IPS module in it. Administrator that is looking for IPS together with Firewall and having limiting budget might want to consider such appliance.

Anti Spam appliance.

Normally also sitting in the parameter, Anti spam appliance is often use to safeguard the companies emails. These anti spam appliance normally come with anti virus built in. It is highly important to do a evaluation test of the appliance before purchase it. In fact, during the evaluating period it is very important to ensure the reliability of the appliance even before running it in the production environment.

Anti Spam appliance are suppose to seat in-front of your company Mail transfer Agent (MTA). This mean that all emails will goes through your anti spam appliance before reaching your MTA. If the anti spam appliance is not reliable, it might jam up all your emails or causes your legitimate mails to be filter off unknowing to you. This might cause the administrator a big problem if the company directors' million dollars e-mails has been drop and no one knows about it.

There are several techniques used to detect spam and taking care of the email security. Greylisting, Content filtering, Sender Policy Framework, etc are just few of them. Be sure to understand them well before you engage the anti spam appliance in your company network.

This is a simple guide and understanding of the devices that can be use in the parameter security. Hope it help some of the administrators out there.