Introduction
In this ever developing technological world, many activities are now carried online in the internet. It is now possible to create your own home based office and transact business online. Other business or activities are considered private by their owners; therefore it is important for them to come up with the ways that will help protect their business activities from the intruders from other places in the internet.
SOHO basically stands for small office or home office. The essay will address various ways in which these home offices can be protected from network attacks. Network attacks can originate from various viruses; hence there is need for protection against them. This calls for formidable solutions to protect home office from unnecessary network intrusion.
Proper firewall solutions must be put in place to guard the home office from network attacks. Firewall is installed at the gateway server to safe guard against network privacy (Easttom 2006).
They guard against hijacking, spoofing, sniffing and mapping. These firewall solutions can either be in software or hardware installed in the individual or company’s computers and includes antivirus, and anti-spyware. As the firewall guards against mostly hijacking and sniffing, antivirus will scan you computer against any harmful program that is running in the computer.
Types of firewalls
There are a number of network fire walls that a person carrying out online business can use.they can be categorized under: packet filters, proxy server and finally stateful packet filters. Packet filters: This is kind of firewall inspects every packet according to the user defined filtering rules and pass or block whatever does not allowed based on the filtering rules.
Filtering rules are either based on the IP address source or IP address destination. This kind of firewall is fast and can be implemented in the available routers. However, it has no logging facility that monitors any break-in that has occurred.
Proxy server
This kind of firewall is just an application that helps redirects user’s requests to the main services depending on the company’s security policy. It acts as a communication broker between the customers and the main application servers.
Most of the time proxy server operates at the application layer under application gateways or transport layer under circuit level gateways. Application gateway normally operates between the protected and harmful networks (Easttom 2006). Since it operates at the application layer, it checks traffics into details hence considered the most secure type of firewall.
Under circuit-level gateway, TCP and UDP are all validated before a connection through the firewall is allowed. It helps to check the connections made and prevent the packets from being forwarded until all the access control rules have been adhered to. Since it validates TCP and UDP sessions in oblivion of the full idea of the applications that use these transport services, it is considered unsecure.
Stateful packet filters
This kind of firewall does not compromise the performance and provide a tight security. Unlike the application gateway, it monitors all the data that undergo the network layer but does not process it. It receives a data packet, check the data against the known state of session, if the packet does not conform to the expected session state, it block the rest of the session.
SoniWALL SOHO
This firewall solution is meant to fully protect businesses connected to the internet from hackers, intruders, destruction and critical business data manipulation. It also helps protect the employees from accessing the private business information through content filtering (Hise 1996). With this kind of firewall, IP address can be easily managed.
In conclusion I believe that this kind of firewall is the best for small office as it is easy to install, affordable and it has all the security fractures ranging from IP management, to prevention against network intrusion.
References
Easttom, C. (2006). Network Defense and Countermeasures: Principles and Practices. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson.
Hise, P. (1996). Growing Your Business Online: Small Business Strategies for Working the World Wide Web. New York, NY: Holt.