Connecting a private network to the Internet can expose critical or confidential data to malicious attack from anywhere in the world. Vicomsoft's SoftRouter can protect both individual computers and corporate networks from these dangers.

Vicomsoft's Internet connectivity solutions incorporate a secure Level Three Firewall, preventing unauthorized access into the local network from the Internet.

In the above diagram, if a machine on the Internet were to try and gain access to a client machine located behind the Firewall, the Firewall would stop it unless the configuration of the Firewall were changed to allow access to certain machines on the internal network using a feature called "Inbound Mapping".

The Firewall therefore stops possible attacks on your network and protects against the "Ping of Death."

Vicomsoft's Internet connectivity solutions give you:

	100% Firewall protection against people accessing your network from the Internet.
	The Firewall is active by default, therefore protecting your network from attack from day one of installation.
	Certain access from the Internet can be allowed into your network via an easy to use interface, offering the ability to run a web server or other Internet accessible service from behind the Firewall.

This major security feature offers headache-free protection of the local network from unwanted Internet users.

Professional firewall products catch each network packet before the operating system does, thus, there is no direct path from the Internet to the operating system's TCP/IP stack. It is therefore very difficult for an intruder to gain control of the firewall host computer then "open the doors" from the inside.

According To Byte Magazine*, traditional firewall technology is susceptible to misconfiguration on non-hardened OSes. More recently, however, "...firewalls have moved down the protocol stack so far that the OS doesn't have to do much more than act as a bootstrap loader, file system and GUI". The author goes on to state that newer firewall code bypasses the operating system's IP layer altogether, never permitting "potentially hostile traffic to make its way up the protocol stack to applications running on the system".

*June 1998

If you want to know more about Firewall Security, see the Vicomsoft KnowledgeShare document on Firewalls.