Securing Your System Network From Online Invasion

By Author: Sailesh Kumar
Total Articles: 6
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Is your business completely secured from the online threats? Here, 'threats' means hostile malwares or viruses which could be fatal to your business if the online security is vulnerable. This could result in losing personal data, finance and business information. Since the inception of broadband internet, creation of these malicious software have become widespread, and causing serious problems to the users. Now, another types of spammers are also created, which are called 'spyware'. These are created cleverly to monitor a user's browsing behaviour, and steal sensitive information. Spyware works through system monitors, Trojans, spyware, root kits, back-door, and by tracking cookies. To protect the computers and their network from these computer contaminants, Web Application Firewall has a very important role to play.

To understand the term 'Firewall', we can imagine a real firewall that works as a protection against the fire and prevents it from spreading further. A firewall is actually a network security system based on a software or hardware that monitors and controls the incoming/outgoing web traffic through analysis ...
... of data packets and verifies its validity to prevent any threat. So, a firewall creates a barrier between a secured network and an external network such as internet, which carries the viruses. With the creation of more sophisticated and harmful malwares, it is highly essential to have an advanced firewall comprising intrusion prevention system and latest firewall technology.

Next generation firewalls provide the following benefits:

Ensures proper usage of the Web applications in a secured environment.

Works as a shield for the web applications and monitors the processing of sensitive data related to finance, healthcare, e-commerce and other important domains.

Enhances the performance of Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) traffic.

Provides additional security through virtual application infrastructure.

The firewall detects and blocks manipulation of users' data done through hyper jacking.

Prevention against the Blind Spots and infection by Virtual Machine (VM) malware.

Helps keeping up with regulatory compliance requirements.

In context of the current threat landscape, it is a high priority that the latest firewall security covers the four major elements, which are Application, User, Time and Bandwidth.

The integration of these four elements in a firewall provides comprehensive protection against the following threats:

SQL Injection:

Through this attack, the hackers get unauthorized access to the back-end database through input parameter. A firewall checks that the inputs do not have SQL injection, directory traversal code, OS commands etc.

Data Leakage:

Data leakage or data theft of sensitive information can be a major risk. A firewall can verify the outflow of data and block the response to prevent data leakage.

Request Forgery:

Request forgery or cross-site request forgery (CSRF) through random tokens to web forms. It exploits user identity on a trusted website by forcing to send a HTTP request. These can be identified and blocked by a firewall.

Denial of Service Attack:

Denial of service attack attempts to interrupt a system or network to make it unavailable to the users. Through a powerful firewall, administrators put restrictions on the number of sessions originating from a specific IP address.

Cookie & URL Parameter Tampering

Through tampering cookies and URL parameter, a hacker alters the data entered in the form fields with the user's authentication. A firewall is quite useful here by setting the form parameters, incorporating encrypted or digitally signed cookies to prevent any alteration.

Besides these, other threats such as worms, brute force attack, XML traffic etc. create threat by slipping through security weak links. To prevent these risks, a premium firewall solution is imperative.