Stories about: Lancope

When it comes to network security, what you don't know can definitely hurt you.

Telecommuting has become a way of life as more companies let employees work from home to do jobs that might otherwise be done on corporate premises. As a result, IT managers are adapting security policies to encompass home PCs.

Drowning in signature libraries and reactive event information that is of little value in locating attacks in progress, network security managers are fed up with signature-based intrusion-detection systems that have been the backbone of network security. Amid an ever-shrinking time gap between vulnerabilities and exploits, signature-matching IDS already has become obsolete, analysts and users say.

After the Nachi worm hit last year, Joe Granneman, manager of networks and PC services at Rockford Health System, knew it was time for a change. "It only took three infected machines to bring down our dual processor firewall," he marvels. "Without our Internet connection we couldn't process claims or do much of anything."