Case Study: Bibliofind
Week 6 Assignment: “Case Study #C1: Bibliofind”
ECOM544: Electronic Commerce Strategy Management
1. Explain how Bibliofind might have used firewalls to prevent the intruders from gaining access to its transaction servers.
Firewalls need to be placed at a company’s Internet entry point as a first layer of protection in a company’s IT security system, so, however many entry points, Bibliofind may have had, they should have had a firewall installed on each one. A firewall could have helped Bibliofind in preventing crackers from accessing their network and their customers personal data, but may not have eliminated it altogether; firewalls use a combination of tools, including encryption, and intrusion detection systems which are the next layers of protection.
Had Bibliofind used firewalls to prevent intruders they would have chosen between one or more of the three types of methods which include packet filtering, proxy service or stateful inspection (a combination of sorts of packet filtering and gateway service). With packet filtering, the packets are small chunks of data that are analyzed against a set of filters, and if those packets make it through the filters, they are sent to the requesting system and the rest are discarded. With a proxy service, information from the Internet is retrieved by the firewall and then sent to the requesting system and vice versa. With a stateful inspection, there is no examination of the contents of each packet but instead compares certain key parts of the packet to a database of trusted information. Information traveling from inside the firewall to the outside is monitored for specific defining characteristics, then incoming information is compared to these characteristics. If the comparison yields a reasonable match, the information is allowed through, but if not, it’s discarded.
But even, with the use of these methods, Bibliofind should also have customized their firewalls and configured them specifically to protect
ECOM544: Electronic Commerce Strategy Management
1. Explain how Bibliofind might have used firewalls to prevent the intruders from gaining access to its transaction servers.
Firewalls need to be placed at a company’s Internet entry point as a first layer of protection in a company’s IT security system, so, however many entry points, Bibliofind may have had, they should have had a firewall installed on each one. A firewall could have helped Bibliofind in preventing crackers from accessing their network and their customers personal data, but may not have eliminated it altogether; firewalls use a combination of tools, including encryption, and intrusion detection systems which are the next layers of protection.
Had Bibliofind used firewalls to prevent intruders they would have chosen between one or more of the three types of methods which include packet filtering, proxy service or stateful inspection (a combination of sorts of packet filtering and gateway service). With packet filtering, the packets are small chunks of data that are analyzed against a set of filters, and if those packets make it through the filters, they are sent to the requesting system and the rest are discarded. With a proxy service, information from the Internet is retrieved by the firewall and then sent to the requesting system and vice versa. With a stateful inspection, there is no examination of the contents of each packet but instead compares certain key parts of the packet to a database of trusted information. Information traveling from inside the firewall to the outside is monitored for specific defining characteristics, then incoming information is compared to these characteristics. If the comparison yields a reasonable match, the information is allowed through, but if not, it’s discarded.
But even, with the use of these methods, Bibliofind should also have customized their firewalls and configured them specifically to protect