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Monday, December 01, 2008

Internet Security

Connection to Internet presents security issues. Organization must have adequate control to protect the data availability, confidentiality and integrity.

The company internal network should be separated from the external network (e.g. Internet). Typically a firewall separates an the internal network from the external network. Firewalls are an essential part of network security. They are used to protect the internal network from external threats that can compromise data, assets and resources—and even reputation.
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Public and Private Network

During the application audit, determine whether the application data travels through public networks or private networks.

Public networks uses public telephone lines. This may be the most economical, but lower quality and security measures may be ineffective.The major concern in using public network for electronic data exchange is security. Unprotected data sent accross the Internet is susceptible to being viewed, copied or modified by unauthorised persons.

On an unsecured network, packets can be intercepted by a perpetrator, the contents changed, then forwarded on to their destination with erroneous information. This kind of attack is also known as MiddleMan attack. For example, an intruder can modify an order placed to a supplier over an unsecured network, by, lets say, changing the order quantity from 10,000 to 10


Private line are dedicated facilities e.g. satellites or telephone lines, leased from a common carrier. No dial-up access is required and security is enhanced. Leased lines are expensive to setup and maintain. Businesses relied on private lease lines to link offices so that workers could share information over WAN (Wide Area Network) and providing high degree of privacy.

Another solution that is relatively less expensive to solve the security problem is via Virtual Private Network (VPN). Using VPN, a company can connect each offices or LAN to a Internet Service Provider (ISP) and routes data through Internet. The success of VPN depend on secure encryption that protect data while in transit on the Internet.

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