Serious gamers will readily complain that not
enough of their employers allow them to play games such as IDSoftware’s Quake
III over the Internet. Allen Cronce, President of PACE Anti-Piracy, isn’t one of
those employers. And he’s glad he has a SonicWALL. "We've been using SonicWALL
firewalls to protect our corporate network for almost two years now,” Cronce
commented. “Over the past couple of weeks, we've been attacked 5 times.”
All of the attacks, Cronce reported, came
during “or shortly after periods where our employees have been playing Quake III
over the Internet.”
Talk about an underhanded way to win a game:
Cronce and his employees concluded that unscrupulous Quake players were using
Pings of Death to “freeze” other players, thereby racking up points on their
newly immobilized competition. If video game cheating were the only problem,
Cronce might not have been so concerned. But, armed with the IP addresses of
machines on the PACE network, the unscrupulous players have launched attacks
ranging from Sub-Seven and NETBUS attacks to port scans looking for vulnerable
machines on the PACE network.
SonicWALL has proven to be the clear winner.
When the attacks come and SonicWALL sends Cronce an E-mail noting that an attack
has been detected and thwarted, Cronce admitted, “We actually get this perverse
feeling of joy.”
SonicWALL has not only provided the PACE Quake
players with a moral victory. Cronce’s staff have been able to, using the
SonicWALL logs and trace routes, tip off the ISPs of the attackers, who have
then had their activity through those ISPs suspended.
Cronce and PACE opted for the SonicWALL
despite the fact that many DSL routers including the one currently deployed at
PACE have built-in firewalling functions. “We wanted security separate from our
router,” Cronce explained. As local DSL connection options improve and new
technology makes upgrading their DSL router feasible (likely from a different
router manufacturer), PACE doesn’t want to have to “learn a whole new way of
protecting the network.” With SonicWALL, Cronce can “keep the company’s security
infrastructure static.”
In addition to the long-standing SonicWALL
protecting PACE’s 20-plus node network at the office, Cronce purchased a
SonicWALL SOHO for his home. Even there, where the main activity is his wife’s
web browsing, DoS attacks have already been spotted and SonicWALL protected the
network. As Cronce pointed out, if you don’t have firewall protection, “once you
start connecting to” seemingly innocuous services such as web gaming or are even
just browsing the web over broadband Internet connections, “you can really get
nailed.”
To learn more about the
SonicWALL firewall and its components and features,
please visit our web site dedicated to SonicWall by clicking on the button
below.
