Security Back to Basics

At work I’m known as the guy who wears many hats. I do a lot of different jobs: installations, training, support, pre-sales consulting, some programming … you name it, I’ve done it. However what really interests me the most is Internet Security.

With that in mind, one thing that comes up on a monthly basis is that I often encounter customers that do not have a physical firewall or ACL rules on their primary routers. I’ve even encountered customers that have their SQL servers on public IP addresses and are basically asking for trouble!

My companys customers have installations currently running on Windows 2003 server, it’s important to note that you can use Windows Routing and Remote Access for firewalling purposes. It’s fairly simple to setup as well.

Here’s an intro to RRAS:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc758437(WS.10).aspx

Here’s a good tutorial on how to get it running. Obviously the ports you’d want to open may vary but the tutorial gives you a general idea on how to accomplish this.

http://www.endlesscomputer.com/tutorial/RRSA_setup.htm

Using RRAS’s NAT/Basic Firewall, you can reduce your server footprint and prevent malicious users from trying to exploit vulnerable ports (like the RPC ports for instance) on your server.

This is not a substitute for a proper hardware firewall. But it’s better than nothing.

Firewalls are not a panacea however; they are one of many weapons in your arsenal.

More to come…