Building Internet Firewalls
In the vast and varied universe of computer books, only a few stand out  as the best in their subject areas.Building Internet Firewallsis one of  those. It's deep, yet carefully focused, so that almost anything you might want  to know about firewall strategies for protecting networks is here. In addition,  there's lots of information on the reasons that we build firewalls in the first  place, which is to say the security risks that come with Internet connectivity.  You'll learn a great deal about Internet services and the protocols that provide  them as you follow this book's recommendations for stifling attacks.If there's a shortcoming to this book, it's its lack of coverage of the turnkey  firewall products that are becoming popular among home and small-office users.  Emphasis here is on more complicated network defenses that require careful  design and setup--both design and implementation are the order of the day here.  The authors carefully enumerate the threats they see in various situations, go  into some detail on how those threats manifest themselves, and explain what  configuration changes you can make to your perimeter defenses to repulse those  threats. Plenty of illustrations make points about good and bad security  strategies (you want to put the routershereandhere, nothereorhere). You'll learn a lot by reading this book from cover  to cover, no matter how much experience you have.--David WallTopics covered:Means of protecting private networks from external  security threats. The authors go into detail on attackers' means of exploiting  security holes in common Internet services, and show how to plug those holes or  at least limit the damage that can be done through them. With coverage of Unix,  Linux, and Windows NT, the authors detail their philosophies of firewall design  and general security policy.