the exclamake! blog

Larry Seltzer of eWeek weighs in on UTM (Unified Threat Management) for the small business.
In the meantime, the reasons to buy one are still compelling: networkwide protection, a second source of protection besides your desktop vendor, access to extra features like content filtering, and easier management.

Mike Rothman posted an article on Skype and the need to control it in many environments.  His opinion is that will be very difficult to control it on the network side of thing and he recommends controlling at the endpoint.  I thought it would be a good time to bring out that SonicWALL is very [...]

Here’s the deal. I do get irritated with the ‘media’ and ‘hype’. Because I’m in the network security arena, I frequently ask myself, is all the press about network attacks legitimate? Are the fears justified? Then I see something like this that settles it in my mind.
Some of you may remember [...]

Keith Schultz of Infoworld has a good review of UTM appliances from Astaro, Fortinet, SonicWALL, and WatchGuard.  The encouraging thing is that all the devices operate very well.
The biggest distinction, in my opinion, is that only the SonicWALL and the ServGate allow for deep packet inspection through all types of traffic.  The other devices rely [...]

The Privacy Rights Clearinghouse has a Chronology of Data Breaches since the first ChoicePoint incident in February 2005.  I spent some time grouping the breaches into some similar categories and analyzing the cause of the breaches.  This analysis covers the report incidents from February 15, 2005 through March 14, 2006.
The categories I used are:

Backup Loss [...]

Most business owners are fairly satisfied with their security when they’ve had a firewall installed and antivirus software installed.
First, they probably don’t have a firewall that could really hold up to an attack, or a proactive network security program that ensures their firewall is actually working. I find that most SMBs select firewalls based [...]