News
Gates Highlights Security, Spam in Comdex Keynote
Bill Gates opened Comdex reiterating Microsoft’s security messages and showing publicly for the first time several new security and spam-blocking technologies.
- By Dian Schaffhauser
- November 17, 2003
(Las Vegas) Bill Gates opened Comdex with his annual keynote,
reiterating some of Microsoft’s messages from recent events and showing
publicly for the first time several new security and spam-blocking technologies.
After a quick demonstration of the just-released Systems Management Server
2003’s patching capabilities, Zachary Goot, technical product manager in
the Microsoft Security Products Group, gave the first public demonstration of
Internet Security & Acceleration Server 2004, Microsoft’s upcoming
new release of its firewall and proxy server software.
“This technology augments firewalls that are deployed today, traditional
firewalls, by adding application layer security,” Goot said. Showing a
new feature called Network Templates, Goot demonstrated how an administrator
can drop the firewall activities into a specific place in the network through
the use of a wizard. ISA Server automatically detects the internal network IP
settings and allows the admin to define the default firewall policies. The wizard
generates the rules, which the admin can customize for a specific environment
with a context-sensitive drag and drop toolbox that appears at the right side
of the screen.
A new feature called HTTP Filter takes advantage of application layer security
to detect certain types of traffic – such as a particular type of file
download – and stop it while still allowing Web browsing to happen. The
filtering blocks activities by evaluating the user-agent header of an HTTP request
to identify specific signatures designated by the admin. Goot said the technology
could also be used to block Nimda, Code Red and their successors, by identifying
their signatures.
[The rest of this article is available on ENTmag.com, at http://entmag.com/news/article.asp?EditorialsID=6034.—Editor.]
About the Author
Dian L. Schaffhauser is a freelance writer based in Northern California.