It is a federal crime to access someone else's computer over the Internet without permission. The penalty is one year in prison for the first offense. Unfortunately most security experts believe that there are hundreds, if not thousands, of uncharged felons operating in cyberspace. That is, there are plenty of people anonymously sneaking into others' machines. Safeguards to Consider Precautions must be taken to ensure a proper firewall configuration to offer the best possible protection for your enterprise.
Firewalls also provide a central point for logging and auditing Internet traffic.
Experts in the field predict that by 2003 the dominant means of deploying network security technology will be through the use of appliance technology. These services will generally cost less than the equivalent salary of a half-time firewall administrator. Virus scanning of incoming e-mail is a critical security control. SMEs should also take immediate action to disallow relay and halt the entry of spam into their environments. The major vulnerability in Web servers is attacks against CGI scripts and other active code.