| Safe@ Managed Security Service |  |
Connecting to the Internet provides all sorts of
new capabilities and with ADSL, access is made fast and easy. Unfortunately, a
permanent connection to the Internet also leaves your home office, school or business
wide open to Internet hazards, such as hackers, viruses and undesirable web
sites.
So to protect your internet connection a system
is needed to stop hackers, protect against virus attacks and also protect you
from undesirable web sites.
However, installing and maintaining these systems
is often beyond the capabilities of a user who does
not want to be bothered or is not skilled enough to keep these systems up to date (how often have
you heard of a new virus doing damage because the virus definitions were
not kept up to date?).
The service offering is based upon you installing the Safe@Office appliance as your permanent internet connection. This Firewall appliance then automatically communicates with a management system at our premises to ensure these systems are protected and kept up to date.
The low cost firewall appliance was developed by SofaWare Technologies, a wholly owned subsidiary of Check Point Software Technologies, one of the worlds leading IT Security Vendors.
The appliance is offered in a number of models as you can see here.
Safe@ Managed
Services
In addition to its advanced built-in security functionality, the low cost firewall appliance allows remote management from our Safe@ Management Centre. This allows small businesses to transfer security management responsibility to security experts to enforce an effective, comprehensive, security policy for any size network. Additionally, this remote management makes add-on security services available, such as blocking access to undesirable web sites and anti-virus checking for your incoming and outgoing emails.
These
remotely managed services are available in the form of a subscription to
Extranet’s Safe@ Managed Services in order to give you protection from the
hazards encountered on the Internet and to automatically keep your Firewall appliance up to
date with latest releases.
The
Safe@ Management Centre (SMC) is operated by Extranet Technologies Ltd (a
licensed Check Point partner) in
Auckland, New Zealand.
The services provided under subscription to the Safe@ Managed Services are as
follows.
1. Anti-virus protection
This service provides protection for incoming (to your site) POP or SMTP mail and Outgoing (from your site) SMTP mail as a result of the appliance being constantly kept up to date with the latest Anti-Virus definitions from the Safe@ Management Centre. The virus scanning can also be set to look at other traffic such as web-browsing etc.
2.
Web
Site Filtering
When
a user behind the Firewall wishes to visit a web site, the web request is sent by
the firewall to the Safe@ Management Centre which uses McAfee SmartFilter to
determine what category (e.g. Drugs, Criminal Skills, Adult/Sexually Explicit,
etc) the requested Web Site belongs to. This category is instantly sent back to
the Firewall and is compared with the list of categories in the Firewall that
have been disallowed access. If the site is in a disallowed category the user
receives a message to say they have attempted to access a disallowed site.
The
undesirable categories are nominated by the administrator of the Firewall or
can be nominated by Extranet.
The
Firewall appliance remembers which category recently accessed web sites belong
to, thus it does not always need to check with the Safe@ Management Centre.
The
key thing to note is that the list of web sites behind the various categories is
constantly updated by McAfee and automatically downloaded to the Safe@
Management Centre – a task that you do not have to worry about.
3.
Firewall
Software Updates
One
of the most important things with any computer security system, is to keep the
system up to date - You have seen above that Extranet keeps the Anti-Virus and
Web Site filtering systems up to date on your behalf.
Another
aspect to keep up to date is the firewall software itself as this is what keeps
the hackers out and prevents them from getting access to your systems that are
behind the firewall.
When
any updates are released by SofaWare for the Firewall appliances these are
loaded onto our Safe@ Management Centre and are then send out to
automatically update your firewall appliance with absolutely no assistance
required by you at your end. These updates are released when new hacker threats
become known or when updates and enhancements to the firewall system itself are
made available.
You
will be notified via email when an update is going to take place and what
enhancements are in that update.
Thus you can always be sure your firewall is as up to date as possible and the process of updating is a task that you do not have to worry about.
4.
Reporting
At
the end of each month we will e-mail you a report showing details of your
internet activity. The report will show...
L
Hacker attacks
that were blocked by the Firewall
L
Accesses to
Web Sites that were blocked
L
What e-mail
viruses were detected and stopped
K
What setting
changes were made to the system
The
report allows you to "drill down" on specific items to further
investigate things like...
J
Where hacker
attacks came from (so you can follow-up with the attacker)
J
What types of
attacks were being used and what these mean
J
The address of
the machines doing the attacks (so you can pinpoint the attacker)
J
An analysis of
the attacks showing a breakdown of the most popularly attacked ports/protocols
and the most prevalent attackers addresses
J
The names and
details of
the viruses that were blocked
J
Automatic
updates that were made to the Firewall software
J
Changes that
were made to the Firewalls configuration
This
reporting information will provide you the basis to enable changes to be made to
your systems and procedures to make them even more secure. Plus you will be able
to see the real benefits of having the Safe@ Managed Services, assuring you that
the system is providing continuous protection.
