In the Internet age, the corporate firewall is a leaky sieve.
That is the sobering conclusion, spelled out in technical detail, in a new report on what is actually happening on corporate computer networks.
The research was done by Palo Alto Networks, a start-up in Silicon Valley, and some of the findings were presented by Nir Zuk, the company’s chief technology officer, at a panel last week at the RSA computer security conference in San Francisco.
It should be noted that Palo Alto Networks is marketing what it calls next-generation firewalls to address the problems described in the report. But the research itself looks quite solid. It is based not on surveys of people but on a study of network traffic at 20 large companies and government agencies over the last six months. Using its software, Palo Alto Networks monitored the computer behavior of more than 350,000 users. The company has pledged to update and publish the results every six months.
Many companies try to block access to peer-to-peer file-sharing services, but programs used to access these services were found at 90 percent of the companies studied. The most popular were eMule and BitTorrent, which are used to share music, movies and software. Read more…
