Firewall Wizards mailing list archives

Secure remote access.


From: "Jan B. Koum " <jkb () best com>
Date: Tue, 15 Dec 1998 15:02:04 -0800

        Hello all,

        I know this is not directly firewalls connected, but I feel this
        in one way or another relates to firewalls since a lot of places
        install firewalls and still allow some sort of other remote access
        via dial-in or etc.

        Hence the question: how paranoid are those of you who are faced
        with doing remote access type stuff? I mean - ideally you could
        just say "no remote access". Why? Because you can do much better
        control of the packets inside your network and hardware inside
        your organization (ok, for now we are not going to talk about 
        crackers dresses as janitors getting inside your building at 10pm).

        I might have hard time expressing this, but notion of the computer,
        which at one point was connected to the big bad internet and now has
        something like Back Orifice running is now connected to your dial
        up will not make anyone concerned with security sleep better. This
        is where l^Huser education comes in - but how effective is it in
        real life?

        I guess what all my mumbling boils down to: what are people doing
        to make sure people who access their network remotely (say, dial
        up for now), have same protection as if they are sitting in their
        cube inside security perimeter. Firewalls? But when they disconnect 
        and then dial into their ISP and do something stupid, there are no
        firewalls to protect them. Give people some type of tamper proof 
        device which will allow dial-in into your network only? Am I just 
        been overly paranoid?
 
-- Yan



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