Hackers have exhausted the protocol level attacks that firewalls traditionally were designed to protect against, and have moved their focus to the application layer.

With up to 70 new vulnerabilities being reported weekly in applications and operating systems, combined with the lack of protection afforded by current installed solutions, the application layer attack is clearly the entry point of choice for external hackers to break into your internet-connected network.

The debate over firewall architectures is over

The internet community has been the host for a long-running debate between stateful firewall supporters and application proxy firewall supporters.

Stateful firewall supporters claimed that the additional inspection afforded by application firewalls was too complex to configure and caused too high a performance penalty.

Application proxy vendors maintained that you had to inspect the application layer model to afford 'real' security and anything less was simply unacceptable.

The change in the threat vector by the hacking community has allowed the application proxy firewall vendors to quietly win this debate. In fact, today many stateful packet filter firewall vendors are adopting some form of application layer filtering, and attempting to reinvent themselves as a next-generation product in an effort to try to meet today's threats.
Read more...


Source : InformaticsOnline

Thanks for the information SiliconFreak!

A great place to go and test your firewall is www.grc.com

Run the "Shields Up" test and see how you fare!

(in reply to SiliconFreak)

Hi MP3Mogul (and others too, offcourse )

Thank You also for this link...I tested my machine...and it said something like..."this machine is VERY PROTECTED"..etc etc...and that they presume I am not using Windows based machine (since they are somehow more vulnerable to attacks that others )... Buttttttt...the point is...that i AM USING WIN XP based machine ...so this latest SP2 + Mcafee Pro Suite sure do great job, dealing with such "problems"... (at least for now...because...never say never...we dont know what tommorow might bring )

Gotta run...cya all...and try testing Your computer with the link above...it sure is worth to see where You stand in hackers "wish lists"

Bye.

(in reply to MP3Mogul)