S. Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick at last February's National Security in the Information Age Conference.
Companies are implementing firewalls which they hope will be their equivalent of the Manhattan Project. These firewalls act as gatekeepers that check the passwords and identification of anyone trying to gain access to a network. However, firewalls are not entirely effective against the malicious attempts of hackers. They rely primarily on passwords to determine who has access to what files and often the users choose very simple passwords like a date of birth or a child or some loved ones name. These passwords alone are fairly easy to guess but more complex passwords can also be bypassed. In one situation, a hacker used a program which simply ran through every permutation of characters until the system let him in. Hackers may also send e-mail to a network which will install malignant coding which may shut down the network or allow them to gain access at a later time. Most good firewalls do not allow the e-mail systems to touch the rest of the network and in this manner they eliminate the risk. Another, more practical downfall of a firewall is that they are very expensive; often they run around .
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$15,000 per site. It is also important to remember that Firewalls should be placed at all critical and vulnerable junctures in a system. An analogy made by Mr. Lipsett in December of 1996's issue of Client/Server World on page 9 states the importance of the use of firewalls with other security programs:.
"A firewall is like the lock on the front door. But if I had important information in my desk, I'd also lock the door to my suite, my office door, and my desk drawer. If it's very valuable, I'd probably have alarms in case someone broke in through the windows. I might also use night watchmen and motion detectors."" .
Encryption is often the next line of defense against the hacker. Firewalls simply block out certain files for certain users and their passwords while encryption changes these files to encoded text and no one can read them unless they have the correct encryption program and the correct key to unlock those files.
