Firewalls Give Businesses False Sense of Security
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CREDIT: Dreamstime
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Small businesses are putting too much faith in their firewall's ability to keep their network secure, new research shows.
Conducted by nCircle, a provider of automated security and compliance-auditing solutions, the study found that more-than-65 percent of small businesses don't scan everything behind their firewalland instead only run security scans of Internet-facing devices. And such partial security scanning is likely to give small businesses a false sense of security, says Elizabeth Ireland, nCircle’s vice president of marketing.
"Scanning only part of a network is like locking only the front doors of your house and assuming thieves won't try the windows or the back door," Ireland said.
An additional 17 percent of the IT-security specialists surveyed said they wanted to scan behind their firewalls but never do because it is too difficult to change firewall rules.
"Smaller businesses without dedicated IT support have found it difficult to find a practical vulnerability-scanning solution that can help protect their entire network without additional hardware or software," Ireland said. "Unfortunately, small businesses face the same security and compliance issues as larger organizations, but they don't have the same resources to defend themselves."
The research was based on surveys of 143 professionals responsible for IT security in small- to mid-sized businesses.
