Cybersecurity

VPNs have been a topic of growing interest for the last couple years. However, since the tragic events in New York City in September of 2001, the subject has become red-hot. Why? Business and network managers now have a greater awareness that the weakest link in any design, whether it be a network or a business, is too high a level of centralization. Distributed systems are highly fault tolerant and difficult to bring down, while centralized systems can be brought to their knees with a single blow.

I've had it up to here with users trolling the web for "hot chicks" and other "hot" things. Its time to put a lid on it. Check out how you can use LANguard for ISA Server to keep cruising losers in check

In part 1 of this series on how to configure an L2TP/IPSec gateway to gateway VPN solution, we examined how to configure the certificate infrastructure and assign machine certificates on the local network. This week, we’ll complete our gateway to gateway VPN configuration.

Many businesses use Norton AntiVirus servers to keep the company’s servers and client computers virus free. In order to keep the virus definitions updated, the Live-Update is used to schedule virus definitions download to the main NAV server, which in turn, updates the client computers.

When I wrote my series on how to secure your ISA Server installation, I had it in mind that ISA Server administrators could use the information to confirm whether or not their ISA Server installations we’re secure. We got some good feedback on the series, but you wanted more! Specifically, you wanted to know how you could test (via port scanning tools) what ports and services were visible and available on the external interface of the ISA server.

Configuring a gateway to gateway VPN is easy using ISA Server. The reason why it’s so easy is that the Local and Remote VPN Wizards make the setup a virtual no-brainer. Well, it’s a no-brainer when you’re configuring PPTP VPN gateways. But if you’re in the market for a high security L2TP/IPSec gateway to gateway VPN, you probably have either been trying to avoid it like the plague or you are pulling your hair out trying to figure out how to make it work!

ISA Server is all about security. ISA is about securing network access into and out of the internal network. But after you’ve done all of your configuring, how do you know that you’ve done an adequate job of securing the internal network and the system that ISA Server is running on?

In part one of our ISA Server Security checklist series, we talked about how to secure the operating system and network interfaces on the ISA Server. In part 2 we'll focus on ISA Server specific configuration issues that you can use to optimize security.

It is important to have some sort of authentication method when using clients to access a resource through ISA, not doing so could result in unauthorized access to resources in or outside of your network. ISA has various methods of authenticating clients, I have discussed this in a previous tutorial (Understanding ISA’s different Authentication types). I will tutor you on how to configure various authentication types best suited for your ISA server. While showing you in five easy steps, how to configure the various authentication types, I will not go into too much detail on each authentication type. For more comprehensive on authentication types information please refer to my previous tutorial (Understanding ISA’s different Authentication types).

A common issue that pops up on the www.isaserver.org web boards is how to configure a DMZ segment on a trihomed ISA Server. Setting up a trihomed ISA Server with a directly attached segment acting as a DMZ is fairly simple.