Introduction

Warfare: For hundreds and thousands of years, civilized and uncivilized nations have waged combat with each other for good, bad, or indifferent reasons. In the technical world, it's much the same scenario. You need to plan your defense against the offense, which is the aggressor. The offense here is the attacker, the hacker, the script kiddie, or anyone else who wants to do harm to your company and its resources. Even unskilled attackers may attempt to probe your defenses no matter how fortified you may think they are. This chapter looks at the seriousness of the issue from all angles so that you can understand the importance of not only having a DMZ but properly securing it (which you have been learning how to do in the past 14 chapters).

In regard to this book, we must convey how to build a defense for your DMZ. The problem associated with building and maintaining a DMZ is simplistic; you are exposed to the public Internet. That single fact alone should be enough to alert you to the dangers of hosting services unsecurely, even within a protected public network segment such as a DMZ. To move back to our reference to modern warfare, to implement a proper security posture, you need to build your defenses. This entire book to this point has focused on just that how to configure a DMZ properly with multiple technologies and how to securely deploy those technologies so that you do not leave back doors into your...