Junos® OS For Dummies®, 2nd Edition

Securing the Infrastructure

The security needs of networks are also continuously changing as new threats emerge and as data is shared across many different users and applications. Staying ahead of both the new threats and business needs means frequent assessment as to whether the current security infrastructure adequately meets the full set of demands from the organization, or whether it makes sense to migrate to a new solution.

Inbound and outbound threats

As the network attack landscape continues to evolve, IT managers must guard against the many different types of attacks that could affect their network.

Relatively simple network level attacks have morphed into more complex attacks that use both network and application-level components to achieve their malicious goals. With end-users directly accessing the Web and casually surfing sites that are known malware download sources, they may be unknowingly revealing personal or corporate private data via e-mail scams or hidden background programs that collect and forward data. This means that an IT manager must not only stop attacks at each layer of the network, for each application and for all types of content, but they also need to stop both inbound and outbound threats.

• Inbound threats: Are those that originate from outside the corporate network, for example, from an attacker on the Internet who intends to penetrate the corporation's perimeter defenses. These threats include virtually all types of attacks from worms to viruses ...