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You can have the best software in the world, but it means little if you don't have the manpower to monitor it. A major challenge of small to medium-sized companies is that they don't have the resources to take on a community of hackers that never sleeps. If you're serious about protecting your network but don't have a dedicated IT Security staff that works 24x7, look at complimenting whatever you choose with a security service like SecurePipe. And no, I don't work for them, but I've seen their work. Good luck!

Hi Matt, long time, no talk! I have to say I agree on this. An even better solution is to get your company to buy subscriptions for everyone who wants one!

They also said they did not turn on the software, but after portscanning all of Charter's IP space that Arin said was allocated to them over 13,000 computers had this port listening out of over 25,000+ (4.5 Class C's) were actively listening for connections and would accept a connection if you telnetted to the port. Whereas scanning a non charter IP subnet there were less than 20 that accepted this (I don't have my numbers with me ATM).

The wonderful fellows at Securepipe.com Looked into this and brought it up with the local "watch dog" columnist for one of the local papers who wrote an article about this. Charter was not happy. The guys at Securepipe also brought this up with the local cable commission. Who were semi interested in this issue. About a week later port filtering was in place, including port 641 (what the software runs on).

They said the use was for the ability to remotely help users. Yes this is a nice function to have, but what if this fell into the wrong hands? The Broadjump software is based off of an older version of VNC that has some weak authentication issues. And also dealing with Charter and @home techs I wouldn't trust these people with my computer anyway. I don't trust my mother with my computer.

This was back in Novemeber/December who knows what they could do now.

wi2600.org You can read the threads here, many to list and you can see the research that we did to get into this. I do not know if an electronic copy of the mentioned newspaper article exists but if it does, I will try and get it posted.

I have to agree with several of the other posts. You really need to hire a security competent network administrator, AND have third party audits. If the audits don't pass, perhaps you don't have the right person in the job.

Rotate between auditing companies, discarding the ones that don't give you the level of service you need until you have three that you can count on.

There are a number of "managed internet security" companies out there that can provide the expertise if you can't hire it internally. One of them is SecurePipe. They do provide a range of internet security services, including audits and managed firewall products.

Yes! And I say this not just because I work for small managed security firm (Please ignore the fact that the website is ugly, I know). If you don't understand how to build a firewall or IDS then you should hire someone else to do it as it is very easy to get wrong (the concept of least privilege is lost on 99% of all network admins who just want things to work). Security takes time to do right and requires constant maintenance (logreading, etc.), if you don't have the time or knowledge to do it right you are going to get burned.

SecurePipe Communications does this kind of thing. We provide a managed firewall service, just drop in our box. The firewall is maintained remotely from our NOC either over the network or via a POTS dialup. We also provide VPN's between firewalls and VPN's between roaming clients and internal networks, our latest software version also supports IPSec.

As to non-firewall solutions, we offer virtual mail and web hosting as well as managed mail servers with virus scanning. We can also host your DNS zones for you. many of our customers are small businesses, often without any full-time IT staff, which is why we offer such a complete set of non-firewall services.

Best of all we are an all Linux shop, from the Product to our Desktops. Several people in our staff have even contributed to open source projects. We also use OSS for all our core business software and will continue to do so for the forseeable future. Our shop is committed to the spirit of the GPL and will continue to do what we can to better the community.

SecurePipe Communications does this kind of thing. We provide a managed firewall service, just drop in our box. The firewall is maintained remotely from our NOC either over the network or via a POTS dialup. We also provide VPN's between firewalls and VPN's between roaming clients and internal networks, our latest software version also supports IPSec.

As to non-firewall solutions, we offer virtual mail and web hosting as well as managed mail servers with virus scanning. We can also host your DNS zones for you. many of our customers are small businesses, often without any full-time IT staff, which is why we offer such a complete set of non-firewall services.

Best of all we are an all Linux shop, from the Product to our Desktops. Several people in our staff have even contributed to open source projects. We also use OSS for all our core business software and will continue to do so for the forseeable future. Our shop is committed to the spirit of the GPL and will continue to do what we can to better the community.

SecurePipe Communications does this kind of thing. We provide a managed firewall service, just drop in our box. The firewall is maintained remotely from our NOC either over the network or via a POTS dialup. We also provide VPN's between firewalls and VPN's between roaming clients and internal networks, our latest software version also supports IPSec.

As to non-firewall solutions, we offer virtual mail and web hosting as well as managed mail servers with virus scanning. We can also host your DNS zones for you. many of our customers are small businesses, often without any full-time IT staff, which is why we offer such a complete set of non-firewall services.

Best of all we are an all Linux shop, from the Product to our Desktops. Several people in our staff have even contributed to open source projects. We also use OSS for all our core business software and will continue to do so for the forseeable future. Our shop is committed to the spirit of the GPL and will continue to do what we can to better the community.