The server is at risk of being broken into, but at least when it's broken into it doesn't breach the security of the inner network. In order to connect from the LAN to the outside world, a proxy is often installed on the Firewall machine. A proxy is a small program that can see both sides of the firewall. Requests for information from the Web server are intercepted by the proxy, forwarded to the server machine, and the response forwarded back to the requester. A proxy server mediates traffic between a protected network and the Internet.
Many proxies contain extra logging or support for user authentication.
Another way of contacting the outside world from behind a firewall is allowing the firewall to pass requests for port 80 that are bound to or returning from the WWW server machine. This has the effect of poking a small hole in the dike through which the rest of the world can send and receive requests to the WWW server machine. The connection between Security, spiders and robots Robots, webcrawlers, web wanderers, ants, worms and spiders are programs that automatically surf the web and collect information. Known robots are the ones of Webcrawler and Alta Vista . These programs can be quite useful, it would be almost impossible to search for information on the web without them.