JLang wrote:
] Perimeter defense is a lost battle.
]
] Like old generals, we're still fighting the last war, in which
] our network was a castle with impregnable walls, a
] well-defined entry point across the drawbridge (head-end
] router), portcullis (firewall) and guards (IDS).

Well, that was an entertaining article, but I'll offer the following:

1. People have been quoting statistics about attacks coming from the inside for years. I doubt its actually true, and it certainly hasn't slowed the sale of firewalls. If you count the amount of scans and probes that come in on a typical internet connection and compare that to internal threats I would be amazed to find that 70% of the threats are internal. I'm not saying internal threats aren't significant or important. I'm simply saying that this statistic is over quoted and under understood.

2. Yes, of course you should harden your internal servers and firewall your "DMZ" off from your internal network! If you're an IT security professional and this is news you ought to be fired. (This is the reason Checkpoint sells well. You can put 12 interfaces in the thing and it doesn't think twice about it.)

3. Rilling up a bunch of IT guys and telling them to implement a "zero tolerance" policy is stupid. The only thing worse then a beaurocrat is a beaurocrat on a mission. When you are responsible for a service that everyone in a company relies on, all of the employees are your customers, not just upper management. You have to find ways to protect critical assets while simultaneously allowing people to do their jobs. Rifling through people's hard drives in search of contraban propagates an atmosphere of distrust that is far more destructive to company objectives then some file sharing. Yes, you should know whats on your network and elminiate things that create risk. No, you should not be a nazi, even if you really enjoy it.

RE: Network Security: Submarine Warfare