Network Abuse

Network Abuse Has Several Undesirable Aspects

Network abuse takes many forms, including access to inappropriate Web sites, using the internal network to engage in inappropriate communications with other employees or other users connected to the Internet; and inappropriate network resource consumption.

Network abuse has several undesirable aspects including employee productivity loss, wasting precious bandwidth, as well as exposing the workplace to various liabilities if other employees are offended by the uncontrolled access. From a productivity standpoint, many companies are seeing network abuse in the form of accessing sport sights, games and online gambling and wish to monitor and control this usage. From a bandwidth consumption standpoint, many companies are concerned about employees accessing nonproductive Web sites that return large graphic files and impact the productivity of all the network users. From a liability standpoint many companies are becoming more and more concerned about their employees accessing pornographic sites, hate speech sites and similarly offensive sites. Access to these sites have no place in their workplace and the access is creating a company exposure since the company appears to condone such network abuse by enabling it and not taking action to prevent it.

Firewalls are not focused on application level monitoring and access control and, as a result, Web control gateways have emerged. These gateway solutions usually include an extensive library of classifications for URLs and Web sites and allow the network administrator to identify and block inappropriate access. The downside with these solutions is that they add delays to the network transit time and introduce another single point of failure. A recent development was introduced with Sessionwall, which provides the necessary control without adding any network transit delays or introducing any points of failure. Sessionwall is passively connected to the network and simply listens to the traffic; blocking only those accesses marked to be blocked by category.

If you already have a firewall, a network abuse monitor adds a new dimension to your level of network protection. Sessionwall works at the session layer and can thus detect intrusion attempts that are not normally recognized by firewalls, which work at the packet layer. Thus, your firewall does the preliminary filtering and Sessionwall does the fine tuning needed to provide your network with maximum protection.

Sessionwall provides the ability to see and monitor internal and Internet network abuse. Sessionwall lets you protect your Intranet users and servers because it looks at the network traffic passing over the network rather than just traffic passing through a single point. Sessionwall provides the ability to show you network abuse and to do something about it. Sessionwall detects intrusions and service denial attacks, detects suspicious and malicious Java and ActiveX applets and detects viruses entering or being passed around your network and identifies inappropriate web usage. It does all this without adding any overheads or introducing any network delays.

Sessionwall has been renamed eTrust Intrusion Detection and is now considered to be part of the eTrust suite of eBusiness security products. To learn more about eTrust Audit and its components and features, please visit our web site dedicated to eTrust by clicking on the button below.