Firewall

The recent US elections served up plenty of drama and even more suspense as the campaign entered its final stretch. Pollsters and forecasters crunched data continuously to accurately predict the paths to victory or defeat for both parties.

One of the most publicized concepts was the supposed "blue firewall", a group of states that had consistently voted for the Democratic party in past elections. If the Democrats could hold onto their lead in these states, they’d all but guarantee victory, or so the polling experts predicted…

The Great Firewall of China is a famous tool of censorship and state control of the internet -- and Russia wants to throw up its own version of the web filtering system. Russia already operates the so-called 'red web' which is used to not only monitor what Russian citizens are up to online, but also implementing blocks and filters such as the recent ban on LinkedIn.

But now President Putin wants to step things up a notch. Russia and China have become close allies in recent years, particularly in the field of state control of the internet, and there are plans to roll out even greater controls over what web users are able to do and access online, ostensibly from fears of an uprising against the government.

Security researchers have discovered a new distributed denial of service (DDoS) method that requires less effort to launch large-scale attacks that can bring down servers or firewalls from a single laptop.

The new method of launching DDoS attacks called BlackNurse was discovered by researchers at the Security Operations Center of the Danish telecom operator TDC (TDC SOC). It operates by using attacks based on low volume Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) to overload firewalls to the point where they shut down.

The UK's cyber intelligence agency GCHQ is planning what has been labelled a 'Great British Firewall' to protect individuals and companies against cyber attacks.

The idea emerged in a speech delivered by the head of GCHQ's national cybersecurity centre, Ciaran Martin, at the Billington Cyber Security Summit in Washington DC.

Increased reliance on the Internet means businesses face a number of different security threats aimed at bringing down websites, impacting performance or stealing information.

Many of these attacks are aimed at the application layer. Content delivery specialist Limelight Networks is adding to its Cloud Security services with the launch of a new Web Application Firewall (WAF).

It is often the illusive H Factor -- the human element -- that ends up being the weakest link that makes cyber-attacks and data breaches possible, sometimes even more so than hackers exploiting zero-day system vulnerabilities or employing new malware.

According to the 2016 Verizon DBIR, human errors are a major factor in most data breaches. This human touch is especially true with the growing mobility of employees and BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) policies that are becoming more widespread. Therefore, while technological cybersecurity solutions take center stage in many businesses' cybersecurity plans, addressing the human element is as important as the technological one.

When a data breach is just as likely to originate from inside the organization as outside, protecting an enterprise can be a difficult task.

Californian company Preempt is launching a new proactive approach that allows organizations to spot threats in real-time without engaging already overwhelmed security teams.

The firewall is still at the center of most network security strategies, but it needs to evolve as cloud technology, software defined networks and next generation firewalls take hold.

This is among the conclusions of the latest State of the Firewall Report from network security specialist FireMon, which finds that 91 percent of IT security professionals believe firewalls are still as critical or more critical than ever to their security architecture.

Just about every firewall claims to protect your personal data by checking for illicit web connections -- but do they really work?

Atelier Web Firewall Tester (32-bit and 64-bit) is a once commercial, now free Windows product which tries to find out.

A researcher from Google Project Zero discovered a serious security issue with the technical support tools supplied with Comodo software products. Tavis Ormandy found that Comodo Antivirus, Comodo Firewall, and Comodo Internet Security all included a bundled VNC server with either no password protection, or a very weak password.

GeekBuddy is a remote desktop tool used by support staff to troubleshoot customer problems, but it also serves as a backdoor that allows for near-unrestricted access to users' computers. The tool installs with full admin rights, meaning that an attacker could very easily gain complete control of a remote computer.

Cisco has released a new firewall solution which aims to completely change how security services tackle cyber-threats.

The new product, Cisco Firepower Next-Generation Firewall (NGFW), is built to detect threats on a system, and not keep the system on a lockdown. Here’s how Cisco explains the new product

Just weeks after Juniper was found to be using insecure code in its products, a security issue has been found in Fortinet's FortiOS. It's a problem that affects the software in older NetScreen firewalls from Fortinet and could allow for remote access of unpatched system.

Buried in the firewall software is a hardcoded password (FGTAbc11*xy+Qqz27) that could be easily used to exploit servers running FortiOS. Ralf-Philipp Weinmann is one of the security researchers who unearthed the problem with Juniper hardware, and he has confirmed the problem which is being referred to as the FortiOS SSH Undocumented Interactive Login Vulnerability.

Networking manufacturer Juniper has discovered backdoors built into its firewalls. The company says that a number of its devices running the ScreenOS operating system include serious vulnerabilities that could be used to take remote control of networked devices, or to decrypt VPN traffic.

The company says that the security issues were unearthed during an internal code review and has issued an out-of-cycle fix to address the vulnerabilities. Network admins are advised to treat the threats seriously, and to make use of the available patches immediately.

A good firewall will keep your company’s and customers’ private information secure in order to prevent issues such as identity theft, hackers and viruses by shutting off access to your network where necessary.

With recent data breaches like that of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management and at Harvard, firewalls are gaining increasing importance in business.

As more apps move to the cloud business infrastructures are increasingly fragmented. This can make traditional on-site security tools ineffective in fighting off cyber attacks.

The threat of attacks remains, however, and a new release from security software company Radware is aimed at protecting both on-premise and cloud-based applications, using just one solution.