Home Office Firewalls
Protecting the corporate office we all agree is important. Protecting employees at their home office can be equally important.
February 6, 2000
by Eric Svetcov
From my IT perspective, supporting home office computing is something I have attempted to avoid like the plague. The thought of delving into the morass of issues involved in the setup and support of a home computer with games, educational software, various home peripherals like digital cameras and modems simply sends shivers up my spine. However, with the profusion of always-on Internet connectivity, IT interest in secure home computing is about to move into the fast lane.
Until recently, folks who took work home typically copied data onto a floppy disk, slipped it into a briefcase, handbag or backpack and then, through the tried and true sneaker net, copied their files onto their home system. Home systems that enjoyed Internet access typically used a dial-up account with a randomly assigned IP address that made it difficult for someone interested in company information from actually attempting to attack the remote employee’s computer.
The age of always-on access via DSL and Cable adapters with static IP addresses is making it not only possible, but likely that someone will attempt to make an attack on that now unprotected computer. (note: I have a pet peeve about calling these devices modems since they don’t modulate/demodulate analog signals. If you catch me calling a digital connectivity device a modem, just shoot me.) In the last month, while researching this topic, I was able to detect four attacks on my home computer (connected via PacBell’s ADSL service) using the excellent and inexpensive ($39.95) BlackICE Defender software firewall package for Windows 95/98 and NT from Network ICE. (Thanks go to Albert Boyle, Sr. System Administrator at Intuitive Surgical and fellow contributor at Windows NT Systems magazine for pointing out this product.)
It is likely in these four cases that the illicit attempts to attack my computer were not malicious, but were more likely merely curious. Likewise, they were probably not interested in any company secrets I might have. However, the possibility of someone accessing personal and corporate documents certainly existed. And guess what, the mainstream media is just beginning to pickup on this and will undoubtedly begin to scare and confuse all of the nontechnical folks (like they do with computer virus warnings) into demanding action from all of us Information Technology professionals.
Before that happens, let’s take a step back and look at what measures we can begin to research in order to provide a low-cost, yet effective solution to this problem.