What things can a firewall protect against?
A. Firewalls can’t protect against attacks that don’t go through the firewall. An example might be a malicious employee who copies sensitive information to a diskette, removes the diskette from the office, and then releases it to someone outside your organization. Another example might be that of a trusted employee who sets up a “back door” entrance into your network, perhaps by attaching a dial-up modem to his desktop or laptop computer. Unauthorized people may also succeed in extracting information from employees who are trying to be helpful. Firewalls also cannot easily protect against viruses, and will be unlikely to do so in the foreseeable future. Virus protection should be implemented as part of a virus protection plan, since viruses can be introduced by many means.
