Where there's a computer, there's probably a hacker knocking on the back door. Finding a back door to a corporate computer network allows hackers to avoid dealing with the front- door security system known as a firewall.
Firewalls are like one-way streets.
They let insiders on a network get out to the Internet, but they are designed to keep outsiders from getting in to the internal network. So hackers head for the back doors such as telephone-based modem connections which are designed to let authorized people into a network from outside. Often those back doors are overlooked or forgotten by the people in charge of running networks, says Lee Sutterfield, president of SecureLogix, a San Antonio start-up company that's developing Internet security software. To find these back doors, SecureLogix has been developing a product called TeleSweep Secure, which should see commercial roll-out by Aug. 7. A beta version is being tested by various companies in finance, insurance, banking and medicine, as well as a federal agency.