3Com to Sell Firewall-in-a-NIC

Broue Master writes "According to a UK ZDNet article, 3Com is commercializing a firewall into a NIC aimed at desktop and servers." Interesting idea, although it'll be interesting to see if the idea catches on.

Comments

Re:Good idea?

[NerveGas]

Well, the $20 Pentium firewall isn't quite the same - while it can seperate one part of the LAN from another (or different networks), the advantage of the card is that it protects your machine from *everything* else, at least theoretically.

Having a principle firewall on the border of your network isn't challenged, but in a setting with many computers which can't be closely individually monitored (libraries, college campuses, etc.), these will at least help to prevent one person from attacking/abusing other machines on the same network.

steve

Uses

[Frying Ferret]

I do see this as having some use. While a firewall can be usefull for protecting from attack from outside, what about attacks from inside. What happens if a user brings in a worm on a floppy that goes after all the machines on the network. The best configured firewall on the between your network and the internet wont help you. Having a firewall protecting each PC could help prevent infection through out the whole lan. Just my $.02

Firewall NIC is not overkill

[acoustix]

I'm seeing this debated on here a lot. The problem is that you're ASSUMING that the "bad guys" are on the other side of your network.

What some of you don't realize is that some of the worst offenders of "hacking" or "people being where they shouldn't" (sorry, couldn't think of a better way to say it) are INSIDE your network. There are a lot of users that might be "just looking around" on the network, but they can cause problems unintentionally.

This example might be harsh but everyone here remembers the TV commercial where the users say "I'm off to crash the server" or "I'm about to take user error to the next lever".

Bad things can happen on the inside, too!