LOSTCIRCUITS

With improving infrastructure of the internet, and broadband access becoming widely available, this safety of remote accesses quickly turned into a quagmire. Hack attacks as originally performed almost exclusively by those who just tried hacking for the hack of it has developed into some very serious business and, among other things has superseded narcotics as the number one source of income of organized crime.

           

Left to right: the shipping box is decorated with a sticker hilighting the included 2 x LAN cables as a $20 value / instant saving. Additional items are a postcard-size mini instruction flyer, the full manual on the CD and the external power supply. Overall, the box itself is very neat and organized (click for larger images)

With cybercrime becoming more and more sophisticated, the means of protection invariably also need to evolve. One common misconception in this respect is: "I bought this firewall only a year ago, so I still should be safe". Big mistake. For the most current updates on probing and stealth, every user of broadband connectivity of any kind should at least twice a year head over to Steve Gibson's site and do at least a perfunctory check of his or her equipment to make sure that there are no holes in the shield. There has never been a time where the bold warnings issued on GRC.com were as justified as today:

The next common excuse for negligence is: "why should anybody be interested in my computer?" The answer is very simple, personal data, credit card numbers or even log-in cookies for message boards that contain a combined user name and password can be used for all kinds of fraudulent behavior or defamation. Purposes can vary, the most lucrative being stock market manipulation by means of "leaking" fictive insider information. Bottom line is that nobody is immune against any of these issues that fall under the wide umbrella of identity theft.

With this in mind, it is clear that security firms are gaining an ever increasing foothold in the IT industry, security officers are amongst the highest paid IT professionals in the current industry. Likewise, companies specializing in consumer firewalls have been amongst the few to prosper even during the downturn of the IT industry. It is no surprise that some of the smaller players have recently changed ownership, just to give one example, Nexland, a known but nonetheless relatively small firewall / router manufacturer was just acquired by Symantec for US$ 20 million.

Speaking of Nexland, one thing they had going for themselves was the Dual WAN configuration of their Internet Sharing Box (ISB) Pro800turbo, a concept that introduced load sharing over two separate broadband connections. Combined with the possibility of using two different ISPs / broadband providers, the ISB Pro800turbo opened up an entire new world of possibilities, especially for small businesses with the need for a fall-back solution in case one provider went down. The drawback, like with almost anything that is good and solid, was the price - an msrp of US$ 400 is not in everybody's reach. Surprisingly, the dual WAN concept has found few followers, however, today, we have an interesting competitor, namely the Xincom XC-DPG402 Twin WAN router, retailing for only US$249.

With the latest firmware upgrade, the Nexland ISB Pro800Turbo supports features as sophisticated as stateful packet inspection, that is, the router itself will scan the data traffic for repetitive patterns of suspicious activity and, hence, add one additional layer of security over the standard network address and port translation (NAPT). Virtual Private Network Connection (VPN) support is already almost a household item but nonetheless an important feature for any inter-corporate communication at the level of where non-disclosures are in place.

Last and not least, there are performance issues as well as the level of comfort for the administrator to configure the entire setup. A configuration and connection wizard like the one included with the DLink series can provide invaluable help, especially for the novice user.

On the router side of things, in the past, testing performance of any router has been more or less a shot in the dark since the 10-100T Ethernet cards were hardly capable of really stressing any routers, unless multiple accesses from multiple host - client configurations collided on the level of the router / switch. The inception of Gigabit Ethernet controllers on the mainboard level has, for once, made life and benchmarking a bit easier here.

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