As it is vital to safeguard your house at entry points, similarly it's always important to protect your IT infrastructure at all possible points of attack. But to do so, first you have to understand what could be the entry points in your IT infra¬structure. Internet or the broad¬band gateway is not always the only point of entry for hackers.Rather hackers and worms are pretty smart now and know that to¬day people use a firewall to restrict unwanted incoming connections. They would rather focus on other contemporary ways of getting into the network. And once they enter, they can open channels and ports through your Internet connection to go out and connect to the out¬side world.

Even a simple USB pen drive could be that entry point. These drives are capable of , auto run' and are plugged into many machines each single day, and hence can get infected very easily. We have visi¬tors coming to us with their own USB drives, with data, and share it with us by copying it to our produc¬tion machines. And if that USB drive is compromised, it can easily upload a worm or a virus or a rootkit in a machine. And once it gets uploaded, it can easily start spreading across the network and infecting other machines. That's not all; these viruses can easily start opening up channels from your PC to hacker machines and can then start uploading sensitive data. Not just a pen drives but also portable devices such as digital cameras, laptops, mobile phones, PDAs and handhelds, all of them pose the same threat.

So, you must be figuring out how one to protect your infrastruc¬ture from these threats. One op¬tion could be to ban all portable data transfer devices in your or¬ganization, which many enter¬prises are actually doing. But that is not the right approach as by do¬ing so you are completely avoiding the use of a great technology. Rather you should deploy solutions that can take care of the risk and at the same time you can keep using benefits of such portable de¬vices.

Another solution would be a good end point security solution. Essentially an end point solution is nothing but an an¬tivirus/ antispyware which sits on all the workstations and laptops (even on mobile phones for that matter), but it connects back to a centralized server for upgrades, deployments and log¬ging/reporting. There are plenty of such solutions available from different vendors such as Syman¬tec, Micro World, Quick Heal, etc.

Other way of protecting against such type of attacks is by deploy¬ing a firewall or a UTM solution which not only scans for the in¬bound (incoming) traffic but also scans the outbound (outgoing) traffic. This will make sure that if by chance any malware or virus has entered your network and already spread itself, the device would prevent it from opening ports and channels to hackers' websites and also from inviting more worms or uploading sensi¬tive data. There are quite a few or¬ganizations that deal with such UTM/Firewall solutions, which scan both inbound and outbound traffic. Some examples are Cy¬beroam, GajShield, etc.