Articles about Firewall

Emsisoft GmbH has unveiled its first integrated security suite for Windows in the form of Emsisoft Internet Security 9.0. The suite comprises all the functionality of Emsisoft Anti-Malware, plus the core engine from its Online Armor firewall.

Emsisoft Internet Security promises the same lean and efficient protection as the standalone Anti-Malware tool, while adding in a user-optimised version of its firewall that -- unlike Online Armor -- is designed to be as beginner-friendly as possible.

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Next-Generation Firewalls (NGFWs) are a foundational component for many traditional network security strategies. While nothing is technically wrong with today's NGFWs, much is wrong with the approach. Most solutions in the market today do exactly as advertised -- combine traditional packet filtering with some application control and rudimentary IPS layered on top. While these capabilities are still important, traditional NGFWs were designed for a more simple time, before advanced threats began burrowing into enterprises through new and innovative means.

Today's sophisticated attacks leverage an array of threat vectors that can take endless form factors. We are now seeing attacks that we couldn't have anticipated just a few years ago. The traditional network security approaches in place to address these challenges have been built from disparate point technologies, amounting to considerable complexity, that create gaps in these defenses that attackers exploit.

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Building the perfect ad-blocker is a complex business, not least because your users can have very different ideas on how it should work.

Some developers try to address this with layer after layer of features. You’ll be able to whitelist this, blacklist that, and add custom filters for just about everything else. Sounds great, until you have to spend an age learning how everything works, and start to notice how all these layers are slowing you down.

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If you’re currently using the Windows firewall then you’ll know the system can work well: it’s lightweight, configurable, and generally does a good job of blocking incoming attacks. But it’s not always easy to use, and deciding which programs can (or can’t) go online is a particularly tricky process.

Fortunately Tweaking.com’s latest tool, "Allow, Block or Remove", is on hand to help. There are no complex dialogs here, no lengthy lists of rules, protocols, ports or anything else. Instead, just find the executable you’d like to configure in Explorer, and you can block or allow it through the firewall in a couple of clicks.

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Comodo has announced the public availability of Comodo Internet Security 6.2, Firewall 6.2 and Antivirus 6.2. These are more than just maintenance releases, too -- there are some genuinely significant developments.

Right-click the Comodo icon and choose the new Advanced View, for instance, and the rather basic home screen is replaced with something much more detailed. You’ll be able to view details on your antivirus, update, auto-sandbox, HIPS and firewall status, as well as see which processes are using your network bandwidth, view recently detected threats and intrusions, and more.

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Check Point Software Technologies has released ZoneAlarm Free AntiVirus + Firewall, the company’s first attempt to make major inroads into the free security suite market.

The core package is exactly what its name suggests: ZoneAlarm’s free firewall, plus a basic antivirus engine licensed from Kaspersky. But there’s also a strong antiphishing module, basic identity theft protection, and 5GB of online backup space available if you need it.

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Dell announced on Tuesday that it will be acquiring firewall and network security management company SonicWall Inc. for an undisclosed sum. Analysts estimate the transaction to be valued at more than a billion dollars.

Dell, which led the consumer personal computer market in the late 90's and early 2000's, is repositioning itself as a systems and solutions provider for government and private enterprise. In February, the company unveiled new storage arrays, virtual network architecture framework, private cloud deployment services, and data warehousing appliances along with a message from founder, chairman, and CEO Michael Dell that Dell "isn't really a PC company."

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Comodo Group’s Internet Security, Antivirus and Firewall packages have been upgraded to build 5.10.228257.2253, which is now available for download.

This is a maintenance release, but it’s an important one that addresses some significant issues. If you’re a Windows 7 x64 user, for instance, you might have come across a situation where loading corrupted executables would cause a blue-screen crash: that’s now fixed. And Comodo report that “compatibility with other security suites is improved”, again, specifically for Windows 7 x64 users.

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One common view of the Windows Vista/ 7 firewall is that it’s a toy, almost entirely useless, and you should replace it with something more capable just as soon as you possibly can. But this isn’t entirely fair.

Sure, there’s no easy way to, say, restrict outgoing network connections to the applications you specify, but that’s more to do with the firewall’s awkward configuration options than the underlying technology. And these are easy to fix. Install TinyWall and this compact tool will immediately extend the standard Windows Firewall, giving you far easier control over who gets to go online, and who really shouldn’t.

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Network security company Palo Alto Networks on Monday introduced a new anti-malware product for on-premises firewalls known as WildFire, which vets new and unknown files in a virtual sandbox to see if they're a new piece of malware, and then creates a distributable signature if they're determined to actually be bad files.

With the WildFire engine in place, a firewall will submit (either manually, or automatically based on policy) new and unknown .EXEs and .DLLs to a virtual cloud-based environment, where they are modeled against 70 different behavioral profiles to determine if they're malware.

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Panda Security has released Panda Cloud Antivirus 1.9.1 Beta, a preview of its forthcoming 2.0 release. The beta sees Panda’s lightweight free cloud-based antivirus tool add firewall protection for the first time.

The new firewall is community based, which means it’s capable of detecting known processes and settings appropriate levels of protection for them without bothering the end user with a pop-up alert. The new firewall is visible from a new tab on the Panda Cloud Antivirus interface.

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Enterprise security and firewall company Palo Alto Networks on Wednesday released the results of an eight-month study of more than 1,200 organizations and 2 million users that observed more than 28 exabytes of data passing through corporate networks. Among the results of the study, Palo Alto found that applications using SSL (secure sockets layer) in some way represented 23% of all corporate bandwidth, and dynamic/port hopping applications represented a further 16% of all bandwidth.

In total, social networking within the corporate firewall has increased 500% in one year's time.

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BetaNews has confirmed through its own testing this morning that a critical patch, released yesterday by Microsoft as part of a worldwide DNS bug fix effort, can and does impact the functionality of software firewalls.

Multiple reports from users since yesterday afternoon have complained of systems incapable of contacting the Internet after having implemented patch KB951748. This patch makes a major change to the way the operating system handles DNS requests. Specifically, it implements a system that enables source port randomization -- a way to scramble the address from which a request is placed -- as a security measure to thwart malicious users from being able to craft false DNS responses, and thus "poison" the caches of DNS servers.

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The Cupertino company has admitted that a setting in its firewall application in Mac OS X Leopard to "block all incoming connections" isn't exactly true. Shortly after Leopard hit the streets, independent researchers took issue with its claims about its new firewall. Researchers at Heise Security said that the application was still allowing certain types of connections to come through.

In its first update to Mac OS X 10.5, Apple admitted that Heise was right, saying the setting "allows any process running as user 'root' (UID 0) to receive incoming connections, and also allows mDNSResponder to receive connections. This could result in the unexpected exposure of network services." The fix does not close down these holes, but rewords the option within the firewall to "allow only essential services." Additionally, it will limit the incoming connections when users select this setting to only a small subset of system services.

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In his decision yesterday which struck down the Child Online Protection Act of 1998, Judge Lowell Reed, Jr., agreed with the American Civil Liberties Union's contention that technological measures can do a better job of protecting children from access to content that any "average" person might deem harmful to them, than some regulation that threatens a $50,000 fine and six months in jail.

While I agree wholeheartedly with that assessment, I would suggest that Judge Reed's opinion, removed from the local context of the ACLU v. Gonzales case and applied to the broader context of our everyday lives, omits mention of an extremely important fact: While the US government could not possibly protect the nation's youngsters from the dangers of communicating on the Internet, and should not be expected to, the burden now shifts to the parent. And in recent days, parents have not fared much better.

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