Next Gen Firewall: Botnets, Phishing and Malware
By David Scott, Managing Member at Avid Communications
As a business owner, you don’t have to look very hard to find a wealth of resources and statistics warning you about the increasing threat and resulting damage of a Phishing, Botnet or Malware incident at your company. Some statistics state that a single incident can cost a mid-sized company over $1.5M. Can your company afford that? Avid’s next-gen firewall service offers a layered cyber security approach to detecting and mitigating threats within your network.
Next Gen Firewall: Botnet Command and Control Blocking
One of those important layers is botnet command and control blocking. To effectively block botnet command & control connections, our firewall solution maintains two databases that are updated every two hours, with a fresh list of Internet domains and IP addresses of known and suspected botnet sites.
A botnet is created when a bunch of computers are compromised by malware that allows a third party to control the device, turning it into a so-called “zombie computer.” And with this accomplished, the third party can engage in a variety of malicious activities such as collecting confidential information, stealing usernames and passwords, initiating CEO fraud, launching email spam or denial of service attacks using the army of zombies to carry out the evil deeds.
Our botnet lists block about 70,000 Internet domains and 30,000 IP addresses, keeping a potentially compromised computer from “phoning home” to the would-be hacker’s command and control location. If a compromised computer successfully “phones home” it essentially gives the hacker free rein of your computer and potentially of your network. Our botnet solution is powered by a dedicated team of security experts from around the world that is continually working to identify new threats from new domains and addresses.
Our next-gen firewall also maintains databases of domains and IP addresses of suspected phishing and malware sites. Both both are topics for a future blog post.
It’s Not Turned On?
One last thing: Avid will occasionally meet a company that has a piece of next-gen firewall equipment that has the capability for botnet blocking and so much more. But these functions aren’t even turned on. In fact in some cases, none of the next-gen functions are enabled!
But of course having the right equipment is the easy part. Getting the appropriate configuration for your business is the real trick, and getting all that done at an affordable price is even harder. We believe Avid has an answer for all this. Please contact us to find out more.
