Good notes from Ray Ozzie about the problem with firewalls. Folks in homes and in business are going to discover this soon. Basically, you have to armor every PC since if you have one infected one, then someone VPNs in and the whole network is poluuted. My buddy, Jon Lazarus, has a good explanation. The Internet is like a dirty stream where you want to get a little clean water. Even one little leak pollutes everything. This means that the vulnerability assessment and individual PC monitoring tools had better get much better.
Just think what would happen if a student went to school, picked up a worm and them wifi’ed into a home or into Starbucks. Everyone would get contaminated. At “Ignition”:http://ignitionpartners.com, even on our private IP addresses, we get 20 pings per minute from various hackers trying to get in.
BoingBoing: Firewalls are Broken, links to this. Just as in the Infoworld article a few days ago, people are discovering why compartmentalized security such as that implemented by Groove is so important moving forward. The alternative is more than a bit frightening: Recognizing their valid concerns, would you allow your employer to “lock down” and remotely manage your home computer? [Ray Ozzie’s Weblog]
