A Conviction of the Firewall Industry

In today’s firewall market, you have a lot of choices. When was the last time someone was fired for buying a firewall? A firewall is typically a infrastructure purchase and considered a best practice. Firewalls have been around for almost 2 decades. The first commercial firewall was shipped by DEC SEAL in 1992…thank you Marcus Ranum! Shortly following DEC SEAL, Secure Computing released Sidewinder. In the 90’s and early 2000’s, the perimeter was well defined and threat landscape was evolving and so was the protection. In the early era of the Internet, the web content was static and the focus was controlling traffic from coming into your network. Who would ever think the web browser was going to be one of the highest targets for exploitation. The interesting thing is that internal web traffic was and continues to be allowed outbound.  Without outbound connectivity, the Internet would be useless.  However, we’ve entered into some interesting times in terms of the threat landscape. We are not dealing with well defined perimeters and the change from static to dynamic content has placed our trusted outbound web connections at risk.
This is extremely important in terms of firewall protection value. The majority of the firewalls out their today can be classified as conventional and fail at providing you protection beyond access control and segmentation. One must step back and (continue reading...)