Firewalls await the enemy within

Internal hacking is widely recognised as presenting the greatest risk to company security because it happens behind the conventional edge firewall.

Distributed firewalls allow network administrators to monitor real-time traffic over the LAN by sending reports back to the administrators' PC.

David Lancaster, technical director at Network Designers, said: "Distributed firewalls will allow the network manager to take control over the traffic and see who is accessing which files on the network. It can prevent so-called promiscuous sniffing - whereby employees are accessing data they should not."

Firewalls inspect the data packets locally on client machines and the inspected data is collected centrally, analysed and presented to the network administrator.

However, Jan Guldentops, director of security specialist Better Access, pointed out that no security measure on its own is sufficient.

He said: "Firewalls are only a piece of the corporate security-setup. User authentication, such as biometrics, tokens, smartcards and especially encryption are also essential."