Forwarded From: Nicholas Charles Brawn <ncb05@uow.edu.au>
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
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Received on Tue May 19 18:03:16 1998