Greg Mulholland

Preventing P2P and Instant Messaging programs from hijacking your network with ISA 2004 Firewalls

Network and Firewall Administrators have been facing a battle to uphold the integrity and productivity of their networks. Some of the major issues they have found with these potentially dangerous applications (P2P, IM’s) are the potential to disclose corporate information (source code etc) in a non mediated forum, the misuse of company resources, legal issues, possible virus incursion and simply the fact that it is another (flavor of the month) type point of attack, potentially jeopardizing the entire network. This article will describe how in simple terms we can leverage a new feature of ISA Server 2004 to prevent these types of applications clogging our internet pipe and exposing our company/network to the above issues.

Remote Administration of ISA Server 2004

If you are like me and despise switching between eight or more Terminal Services sessions, even on a dual monitor setup. Then you will probably be aware of the "lovely" ability to install remote admin tools on your XP or other desktop machines. For those of you who have never attempted it or would like to be able to do it on ISA 2004, here it is.

Configuring Alerting in ISA Server 2004

ISA Server alerts are a wonderful tool. How easy it is to be working away, checking joke emails from friends you never talk to anymore, not knowing that your firewall is under attack. Well, not that I am advocating getting wound up in joke emails, but ISA Server firewalls make use of their own monitoring and alert features which can recognize when intrusions or attacks are taking place. The nicest part about this feature is the ability of the ISA firewall to respond to these types of attacks.

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