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Organizations face a vast array of security threats inside and outside corporate firewalls. Satellite offices, partners, customers and employees working remotely create expanded security challenges. Traditional approaches to security are not enough to handle current challenges. Corporate security must be capable of easily and seamlessly extending itself outside the firewall to protect corporate information wherever it goes.
Security threats from viruses, worms, hackers, etc., all stem from one key issue - not being able to positively identify who you are communicating with. These threats include:
1. Application Servers - In many organizations, the most exposed parts of their network are those servers and points that are available to the web. You should keep your application servers including web servers as far away from your firewall as possible.
2. VPNs - Many organizations depend on VPNs for remote access and communications outside of the firewall. Performance and scalability issues make VPNs unsuitable for large rollouts. In such implementations, performance issues arise in maintaining the number of persistent connections. In some cases, VPN servers also require application integration, and thus complicate the process of maintenance on the network and the protected applications themselves. Above all, VPNs address nothing of the critical need for establishing the identity of the participants.
3. Wireless LANs - Wireless access points are extremely easy intruder entries. Hackers will attack the weakest link in any network. By adding wireless access points, you are reducing the overall security of your whole network. Nomad SA improves the security of your network by enabling security in the form of encryption and digital signatures directly to the user.
4. Maintaining User Access - Security administrators find it difficult and expensive to ensure termination of access for those no longer welcome on the network in an expedient manner. Nomad SA users simply invalidate their digital signature, stopping access to any resource being protected and alleviating the pressure for the security staff to immediately locate all user accesses.
5. Social Engineering - Social Engineering, the act of obtaining User IDs and passwords willingly from legitimate users through deception, is the most successful tool in the hacker's arsenal. Nomad SA dramatically limits Social Engineering by employing two-factor authentication. These 2 factors include something they know (Pass Phrase) and something they have (Physical Possession of the Digital Certificate), making it nearly impossible for a user to willingly give up their access through deception.
6. Remote Web Access - Web connected access points are dangerous exposures for any network. Exchanging sensitive corporate information in daily communications can provide the opportunity for interception or modification. Nomad SA was designed to easily and seamlessly extend corporate security to where the user is located. The encryption and digital signatures exceed industry standards for security. The digital signatures that Nomad SA employs are portable to wherever the employee might work.
7. Policy Implementation - Employing strong encryption and digital signatures is only one aspect of a proper security methodology. The often-overlooked aspect is the implementation of policy methodology. Policy is an important and unique aspect in the Nomad SA solution. Two important tasks are accomplished: one is the authentication of communications as being trusted or non-trusted using the digital signature. Secondly, Nomad SA policy is an extension of corporate policy, and is an important part of protecting sensitive corporate data and communications not only from outsiders, but also from misuse of insiders as well.
8. Maintaining Server Security - Eliminate the pressure of always having to be current on security updates on your servers. The validation of digital signatures and decryption of data through Nomad SA will ensure that your critical business servers are receiving only valid authorized communications.
9. SPAM - Viruses and clogging of email servers thorugh SPAM is a result of the inability to properly distinguish trusted email from non-trusted. The digital signature technology applied to email by Nomad SA provides a foolproof means of separating trusted email from non-trusted. Non-trusted email can be safe-housed, deleted and/or have the security administrator alerted.
10. Firewalls - The firewall has come to create a false sense of security that can be dangerous. Most organizations believe that the most likely source of a breach or attack will originate from outside the organization. They believe that since they have a strong firewall in place to protect them from the outside that they are safe. The 2003 CSI/FBI Computer Crime Survey identified one of the greatest threats as originating internally. Strong encryption and digital signatures of communications are just as important for those originating inside the firewall as for those coming from outside.
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