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ok, in our office we just got a 4 computer network.
know, my question is: why in the name of what is sacred.
is the guy who install the network does not whant to put a firewall or a antivirus.....every time i ask he tells me is not very inportant!..does any of you please tell me what can it be the reason for this??? thank you, for your time.
Tell the guys he's a ****ing dumbass, reffer him to this website and we'll tell him he's a dumbass, then go ahead and install a firewall and AV yourself.
Do you mean software firewalls on each computer? Because that really isn't important if you have a firewall on the router. But AV is pretty important on all the machines. It's still a good idea to at least use the windows firewall on the machines.
Hey he may not be too dumb. You figure the computers could be unplugged from the power outlet, all the removable media drives may have been removed, a keyboard was not included in the set up, and the ps/2 ports and the usb ports have been soldered shut. ;) Now then I don't think it would be very important to have an AV or Firewall.
If the guy installed AV and Firewall protection on your network's perimeter, dont worry too much. If not, you are probably dealing with an inexperienced consultant. Im fairly certain that option 'b' is most likely the case and you are better off investing your money in someone with more experience.
*edit...never considered that this could be a completely isolated environment...which would make the guy basically correct*
reasons:
a) without a firewall and an a/v you cant survice 20 minutes on internet
b) same as a
c) same as b
d) if you use e-mail ( i bet that you use outlook) you can get a lot of malware and destroy all usefull data on your hard disk.
but:
i) you dont have a internet/external connection (inclunding thru network) AND
ii) your computers doesnt have floppy, cd or usb connections and
iii) you have no way to bring any file to your network
so you dont need an a/v nor a firewall
heh..sounds like my former schools admin., but worse. He left the admin tools right out in the open! And he wondered why **** was happening. Some people that small time companies hire are only graduates of computer 101 classes!:( But not all. But if it the situation is like soda said:
Then no problem. It could be that he just thinks your a lamer that watches CNN too much and does want to tell you anything.Quote:
Because that really isn't important if you have a firewall on the router.
Okay, all bullshit aside -- the guy either meant something else or he's an unqualified consultant. You should always have a firewall (whether tis be software or hardware, such as a router) and an A/V software system setup on every system in your network.
YEP! THIS GUY IS A NUT CASE.THANK YOU
SO, WHAT IS THE BEST SECURITY SOFTWARE AND FIREWALL FOR NETWORKS???
AND AGAING THANK'S FOR YOUR HELP.
A bit of advice, easy on the caps lock(its the same as screaming). Also, dont make multiple posts in a row. You should condense them into one single post. Now for your question,
If you want free apps I would recommend AVG for Antivirus Link. As for Firewall, you have a lot of choices but Kerio seems to be one of the better free options. Link.
-NeuTron
If it's a network and you have enough money to have a network admin, I don't think you should be installing software firewalls on the machines. Generally it's cheaper and "better" for you to have one firewall acting as a gateway for all your machines. For one thing, it means that all the machines share the same firewall rules, and for another, it means if you want to update the firewall to block something or allow something, you only have to change your gateway.
I'm not going to say that hardware firewalls are better than software firewalls, etc...but I don't think you should have individual firewalls for each machines, and a machine running as a dedicated firewall and gateway is probably going to be more expensive and more hassle than a hardware firewall/router would be.
So before you say that the guy is a nutter, ask him what the setup is. Ask him what his reasons for saying that you don't need firewalls/antivirus software, and check out if you do have a firewall at the gateway. He may have had a reason.
ac
Oh, cut the bullshit, uneducated and ignorant comments aside, the guy is not crazy and probably has the system set up securely enough for what he thinks is necessary.Quote:
Originally posted here by cacosapo
reasons:
a) without a firewall and an a/v you cant survice 20 minutes on internet
b) same as a
c) same as b
d) if you use e-mail ( i bet that you use outlook) you can get a lot of malware and destroy all usefull data on your hard disk.
but:
i) you dont have a internet/external connection (inclunding thru network) AND
ii) your computers doesnt have floppy, cd or usb connections and
iii) you have no way to bring any file to your network
so you dont need an a/v nor a firewall
Let's consider why someone might not install software firewalls nor AV's. First, both AV's and firewalls are usually high resource hogging programs that slow down the network computers tremendously (look at Norton Corporate). Second, for a software firewall to work correctly, the user on the computer must be competent enough to understand how to configure the firewall and operate its policies, thus many networks use hardware firewalls, which like gothic said, usually are cheaper because no licenses have to be bought. Third, AV is not a necessity at all, depending on how the admin has setup user policies. If a user has enough restrictions placed on him, an AV will do nothing more than suck the computer's resources like a cheap hooker.
And as for your ignorant a) comment, I have a personal computer running Apache 2 with no firewall nor AV. This computer serves as both a server and my daily use PC (word processing, renders, and coding) and at the time of writing this, the uptime is about 2.5 weeks (give or take a day or two).
IMHO, the only real way to secure a network inside an office region would be to follow the steps below:
1: configure the bios for each machine to be the same. No USB (not many businesses actually *need* USB and packaged compaq/hp/dell comps still use PS/2 mice/keyboards), no floppy (not only do you remove the ability to have bootsector viruses but you also remove that level of data transfer and circumvention), things like that. Lock the bios with a strong password. They should never get into it anyways, and if a machine has to be replaced, you know the drill and routine to follow.
2: install the OS. Assuming XP Pro or 2000 Pro, both can be configured and fully patched. Set up policies so that the single user account on the machine can't do anything short of running the few programs they're allowed to. If it's a linux desktop, even better, but I doubt that, so I won't even go into that.
3: remove all indications of Outlook, OE, and IE. Replace them with updated versions of anything else, whether it's Mozilla, Netscape, Firefox (woot!), Thunderbird (mail client for Firefox), or Opera. By replacing these, the business now isn't *as* vulnerable as those that use MS-only products.
4: buy a site- license for Ad-Aware Professional which allows for remote scanning so any IT staff can schedule and run network scans.
5: make sure Office 2000/XP is installed and patched, etc. I don't like using Office anything, but it's the defacto for offices.
6: install a hardware firewall and an antivirus program of your choice (do your homework) on your email server. Scan everything coming in and going out, regardless. Limit size of downloaded files to something reasonable, like 1mb. Nothing business-related larger than that should be sent over the wire, ever, and personally, I'm sick of those 13mb whatever.mdb or 1.9mb foo.xls things that get to be sent...talk about trashing the line for a while.
7: spend a good few hours perfecting this setup.
8: make an image for ghosting purposes.
Doing the above allows you to have a relatively locked-down image that doesn't allow the user to do anything except what they're allowed. Sure, it's a bit more detailed than that, but until people start using linux as a viable desktop a lot more, extra effort will always be required for securing Windows-based machines. Not saying that linux out of the box is secure; far from it. But by default, it's a lot better than a windows installation out of the box.
There's a lot more and end users in the end will still be "end" users and not ever get educated to the level they need to be. That's probably the biggest security risk right there. Programs I can fix, exploits I can report and deny, but nothing can be done (generally) with a happily-ignorant user who won't listen because they think being twice my age means they don't have to.
Instead of relying on AV and definitions of what is already a known and a detectable threat, he may have policies over what type of changes are made to the box. He could have a program similiar to hijackthis! and regprot, have various methods of checking the integrity of files other files that programs like hijackthis generally ignore. Rarely login as as admin or root unless serious changes are needed. Tweak around with things properly, turn off what is not needed.
He could also have a sniffer that is not only watching over things & loging them but also droping traffic... as far as I've seen FW software have never been as configuerable... yet alone open source as all these sniffers out there. He might also even have an almost subgenius method of handeling the checksums and logs...
Look around you for a moment, it is all of the end-users out there that have AV and FW programs doing 80% of the work for them yet time after time it is proven that sometimes that's just not enought... well why is that? Well most computers get owned because of vulnerabilities which most often this is poor design and configuration & lack of updateing from a user, the fact that most home users login as admin and have no policies over what goes on, people just plain don't know or care about the little changes here and there in their systems behing their back, oh and all this stems from sheer stupidity.
All you've provided about the situation is ("He doesn't have an AV or FW software therefore he is a ****in' dumb-ass") you would be surprised how many important servers out there that don't have Anti-viral or firewall software installed on them for performance issues.