We should all take internet security seriously

There are two ways to protect your data on a PC when connected to the internet. You can sit behind a hardware firewall or you can mount a software firewall on your PC.

The disadvantage of the deadicated hardware firewall is cost.

The disadvantage of the software firewall is lack of security on some platforms.

Yes Win platforms are proving to be vulnerable while Linux and hard machine coded offerings are more durable.

Because the Win platform had to be backwards compatible it inherited the basics of Win3 an operating system not designed to be secure from the outset as it was not intended to be networked and only used by a single person, it was the Personal Computer. Win 2K or was it Win Server 2K was described by Microsoft's chief designer as having so many security issue they would not be fixed within the life of the product. Thank goodness the later Win releases are better and if the operating system is kept up to date along with the applications then provided a top notch software firewall is installed the system is useable, best in a laptop environment where it is not always online. We have chosen Panda Cloud Corporate Managed Firewall and Anti Vrious.

Unix and it's derivatives were designed to be networked and to be secure from the off. The special firewall software application is a reduced kernel and as there is less code it is even more resilient than the parent Linux. Smoothwall is our choice for robustness and incidentally the software is free (a donation is requested though). There have been very few reported incidents of penetration. Smoothwall is not quite a do it yourself job for the masses, we however will load and maintain it for you. The best bit of news, you can recycle your old PC to have the best value for money hardware firewall around, it even compares with the bespoke Apache hardware fire walls, you can run multi user desktops, web and email servers behind Smoothwall and like Apache hardware fire walls they may be run permanently.

Hard machine coded /hardware fire walls fall into two types, the large expensive Apache circa £6,000 and the offering in the ADSL Modem Router. The drawback is the inability for the Administrator to simply update should unfortunately there is an instance of penetration. Many of the simple type of product places a reliance on the fact that they are few in numbers and so Mr hacker spends his time where there looks to be larger number of systems to plunder. Unfortunately if you pick a low cost product the manufacturers support only matches the price and you can end up in a pickle.

So to summerise if you turn off your computer, that is use it for shortish spells then Panda on your PC / Laptop is fine. I you run your PC 24/7 then you really need a Smoothwall Firewall.

Is to mitigate the disaster caused by your PC's breakdown, whether due to hardware failure or malicious internet attach.

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Last modified: 24/02/2011 A