Is the firewall really useless?

Now the industry seems to have a trend that the firewall seems to have no use, anyway, the firewall can not block what attacks. In this year, "Gray Pigeon" and "Panda incense" and other security issues are common, so for users, especially those who have more money for large industry users, more likely to buy some more expensive IDs or IPs solutions. But in fact, the firewall still has its useful, the firewall can also do more, perhaps for many users, there is no need to spend more money to buy IPs.

Now, UTM, content security has become today's information security of the term, in such a large background, what should the firewall look like? What is the body of the firewall? Secure Computing Corporation China general manager Cai Yong and China technical director Guo Wei explained the view, from the design of the firewall itself, is as a security defense tool, and not the industry now some misleading, the so-called firewall is to win by speed, in fact , the firewall should rely on security to win, this is the fundamental firewall.

Indeed, the firewall from the functional point of view, its essence is a network security equipment, not routers or switches, security should be more important than the network permeability of reference indicators. If the final security is missing, then the "firewall" does not complete the firewall should do things, then the firewall is really become a router.

Of course, this involves an industry-level question of whether the future is dominated by traditional security companies or by network-equipment giants like Cisco. Here we do not want to discuss this topic, or want to pay more attention to the firewall product itself.

In addition to security, for firewalls, it is also important that the application Layer agent performance. You know, in the current Internet environment, the attack from the application layer is the main threat to the enterprise, organization and personal network security factors, even if the network layer and transport layer is no problem, it does not mean that the performance of the firewall is very good, very safe. But it is also because the application layer of attacks on the entire Internet has become increasingly dominant, so that the application layer agent performance has become more important.

The other is the active defense of the firewall, Secure Computing Corporation launched the SideWinder 7.0 is a provision of active protection firewall, which integrates the Trustedsource reputation technology. The real-time scoring system can cut off connections with malicious information, thus preventing security threats such as spam and phishing attacks, and effectively freeing bandwidth space and reducing the processing burden on downstream servers.

In fact, for the choice of firewalls, or for the defense of information security, should not be "Peter Paul", take a period of time before the "Gray Pigeon" and "Panda incense" and other viruses, there have been a lot of special kill products, from the commercial point of view or from the technical level, it is very speculative, at that time is to plug, Then there are other "white pigeons" or "monkey worship" and so on tomorrow, then what to do?

So, on the other hand, it also means that Chinese users don't have a long-term plan for security. In fact, whether it is the choice of firewalls or other security products, a long-term layout is essential.