All kinds of people are trying to get into your organization through the Internet. These software firewalls help keep out the riffraff. Over the past year or so, organizations as clever and exalted as the Central Intelligence Agency, the U.S. Department of Justice, and NASA have had their Web sites hacked.
Help is available from Internet firewalls.
They can keep unauthorized visitors from a ccessing sensitive resources inside the corporate intranet while still allowing access to public resources like the corporate Web server. Even if the Internet server isn't connected to an internal network, a firewall can help protect the integrity of data published there. Even if your Web server is isolated from your intranet, a firewall is still a good idea for screening the server from unfriendly probes and thwarting HTML vandals. And it's an absolute necessity if the server supports commercial transactions. For this report, we tested six Unix products and three Windows NT products.