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Strategies & Market Trends : e-Commerce the Next 100 Months...... -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: patlew who wrote (215)	3/23/1998 6:58:00 AM
From: AugustWest	Respond to of 2882

More Security anybody?? Go to the link. It lists the field players. Might be adding to the list? ############################### Corporate Firewalls Getting Weaker, Not Stronger - Report <Picture><Picture><Picture>March 23, 1998<Picture><Picture><Picture> CARLISLE, PENNSYLVANIA, U.S.A., Newsbytes via NewsEdge Corporation : Do you consider your enterprise network safe behind thefirewall you just bought? Maybe you should think again. An industry certification group warned Friday that firewalls - especially new ones - are having more, not less, trouble making the grade, and the corporate rush to Windows NT is partly to blame. A firewall is a set of filters, either "pure" software or on preconfigured hardware platforms, that blocks unauthorized data from entering or leaving the local network. They are meant to keep out intruders and other nuisances. The firewall warning was issued Friday by the International Computer Security Association, or ICSA (formerly NCSA), a for-profit consortium that tests and certifies firewalls, antivirus programs and other enterprise-oriented products. Vendors pay a fee for testing and, if a product passes, the vendor can use the ICSA certification logo in its marketing. If a product fails, ICSA tells the vendor what went wrong so the engineers can take it back to the drawing board. Then it can get retested. "We've been seeing a trend toward poorer quality products," Don Krysakowski, ICSA lab director, told Newsbytes. "In fact, six percent of the firewalls we've tested were never able to pass, but they're still out there being sold as firewalls." By comparison, in the past any vendor serious enough about its product to seek certification never failed to patch or upgrade its firewall systems until it got the logo, said Krysakowski. Asked if the vendors were just getting sloppy, Krysakowski replied, "I don't see it as a vendor issue so much as a rush to market to meet some new demand. We're seeing established vendors as well as 'newbies' with the same problems." He added, "One of the big issues is the NT products. We can all guess at the reason, but it's a definite trend. It's a rush to market." Krysakowski said one critical problem is poorer documentation, which slows down testing and affects certification since it contributes to firewall failure by preventing proper configuration. When documentation is poor, it requires calls to the vendor's technical support staff, and, said Pete Cafarchio, firewall program manager, "Tech support is not all it should be either with some of these vendors." Cafarchio added that all the complete failures were for brand new products and that all the well established products all had successfully won certification. Data on which ICSA based its warning goes back to June, 1997, when the organization updated its criteria to include secure socket layer protocols, expanded forms of HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) files, remote network management issues and various types of denial of service attacks. Krysakowski recommended that firewall administrators visit the ICSA World Wide Web site at icsa.net to find out if a vendor has been certified. In addition to a list of certified products, the site contains a set of lab notes with information on what it took for a product to achieve ICSA certification. "By moving to public disclosure, vendors will have stronger incentive to meet ICSA standards on their first pass," stated Cafarchio. Reported by Newsbytes News Network: newsbytes.com . (19980320/Press & Reader Contact: Mark Coker/Jim Azevedo, Dovetail PR, 408-395- 3600, E-mail DovetailPR@aol.com) <<Newsbytes -- 03-20-98>> [Copyright 1998, NewsBytes]