Security issues on the internet : a technical overview

Abstract

Increasingly, organizations are connecting to the Internet to establish a business and electronic commerce presence and to access information rapidly. When an organization's network is connected to the Internet without adequate security measures in place, it becomes vulnerable to attacks from external adversaries, unable to prevent many forms of undesirable access to its network, systems, and information assets. The risks include loss of confidentiality of business information, loss of availability of mission-critical services, exposure of critical data, legal liability, and vandalism of public information services. Available technologies provide effective tools to manage the organizational networks' risk by providing access control mechanisms that can implement complex security policies. Some of the most popular and widely employed techniques are firewalls, virtual private networks and intrusion detection managers. This paper will be looking at the technicalities involved in these techniques together with an analytic critique of their performance and of potential pitfalls.