Internet Security & Use of Firewalls

An Internet firewall is a software program or group of programs that promises to guarantee secure linking between an organization's computer network and the Internet. Security has become one of the primary concerns when an organization connects its private network to the Internet. A 1995 study showed that 1290 network managers reported financial losses due to ineffective network security. Twenty percent of those respondents indicated that breaches in network security stemming from Internet connections were to blame. In addition, of the companies that indicated a crack in network security, losses were estimated to be above one million dollars (Lopez, 1996, 40).

Regardless of the business, an increasing number of users on private networks are demanding access to Internet services such as the World Wide Web, Internet mail, Telnet and File Transfer Protocol (FTP). In addition, corporations want to offer Web home pages and FTP servers for public access on the Internet. Network administrators have increasing concerns about the security of their networks when they expose their organization's private data and networking infrastructure to Internet crackers. To overcome these fears and provide the required level of protection, an organization needs the protection that firewall programming can provide (NEC's Internet..., 1996).

Most explanations of firewalls become quite complex with technical descriptions. To simplify this explana

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nce the network administrator will never know if the firewall has been successfully attacked! Address Correction and Control Due to increased Internet usage, there is a shortage of the serial numbers known as IP addresses. This problem is solved by a system that appears on many firewall programs, a Network Address Translator (NAT) (Lewis, 1997, 170). This program code assigns sub addresses to a registered address thereby expanding the system. For instance, assume a company has the registered Internet IP address of "205.152.188.204" If the company was lucky, it might also be able to get the additional final numbers 205, 206, and so on. The more normal case is that the sequences are unavailable, forcing the company to keep a set of records concerning an IP allotment. By using NAT, the computer firewall software adds a four digit internal number to the IP assigned by Washington. In this case, 205.152.188.204 would become 205.152.188.204.0000. Software Analysis Of the some 800 firewall software programs on the market, some 70 percent are designed for use on single station PCs directly linked to an ISP. Several software programs have become quite popular, including SATAN, Catapult, StealSafe, KyberPass, Checkpoint, and FireWa
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Approximate Word count = 1959
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page)

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