Forwarded From: Nicholas Charles Brawn <ncb05at_private> 19May98 AUSTRALIA: COMPUTERS - INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY - HOSING DOWN THE FIREWALL. By DAVID HIGGINS. YOU'VE been told your computer network needs a firewall - an electronic moat that protects your company from nasty viruses and hackers. But Security Dynamics, a world leader in remote access security, has a scary new message: by itself, a firewall is no longer an adequate method of protection. Companies are now opening up their networks to strategic partners, suppliers, distributors and customers, and there is too much traffic through the firewall to ensure its integrity, says Security Dynamics chief operating officer, Arthur Coviello. Instead, Security Dynamics, (a US$140 million company which owns the famous US cryptography lab, RSA Data Security) has turned its attention to application-level security. "Firewalls have started to disintegrate," said Coviello, who was in Australia last week for a series of seminars. "That perimeter defence is starting to crumble [and] more and more you have to secure individual applications." In addition to a single shield around the corporation, there would be many internal shields protecting individual systems within the network. This also allows for a more customised and finely tuned security system, Coviello says. Application-level security had arisen from the spread of Intranets and Extranets (respectively, internal and external private networks), within which a company needed to apply different levels of security - even to the point of locking down individual pages, he says. Coviello warned that hacking was still a widespread practice. On the bright side, Coviello had positive news about US government restrictions on high-level encryption. The international distribution of American-made security products had been limited by the US government, but Coviello said he was confident Security Dynamics would soon be able to market its full range of SecurSight products in Australia at the strongest level of encryption. SYDNEY MORNING HERALD 19/05/98 P4 -o- Subscribe: mail majordomoat_private with "subscribe isn". Today's ISN Sponsor: Repent Security Incorporated [www.repsec.com]
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Fri Apr 13 2001 - 12:53:39 PDT