TABLE OF CONTENTS The purpose of this chapter is to:
Illustrate key features of a firewall
Provide a very brief overview of Cisco PIX
Provide a very brief overview of Check Point FireWall-1
I was sitting in Deutsche Bank talking to the main man in information security, the CISO. He said, If it wasn t for the Internet and firewalls, I d still be earning $45,000 a year working for a minor IT manager. This dude was on a yearly salary of at least $150,000.
And that is a fact for most of us. Nobody, not even the banks, paid good money for security before IP networks became predominant. When the Internet took off, if you were one of a couple dozen people in the U.K. who could spell firewall, you got treated like a minor rock star.
God, how I miss it.
The previous chapter provided basic rules of thumb and design paradigms for deployment of various key pieces of infrastructure such as firewalls, IDSs, and IPSes. This and the following chapters look at these building blocks in more detail.
The term firewall has been adopted to describe a single piece of software and hardware that protects a network. A firewall is a little black box that keeps the bad guys out.
Historically and more properly, it is more than just one device/function it is that combination of hardware or servers, software and management activities used to control communications between internal networks and...
