VPN
Virtual Private Network: a network that uses a public telecommunication infrastructure, such as the Internet, to provide remote offices or individual users with secure access to their organization's network. A VPN works by using the shared public infrastructure while maintaining privacy through security procedures and protocols that encrypt data at the sending end and decrypt it at the receiving end, thus creating a 'tunnel' that cannot be 'entered' by data that is not properly encrypted.
Back to top of page
DoS
Denial of Service: an attack aiming at depriving a user or an organization of services that they would normally expect to have, eg e-mail. A DoS attack can also result in the temporary loss of all network connectivity, potentially costing the target a great amount of time and money.
Back to top of page
SPI
Stateful Packet Inspection: a firewall technique that ensures that any incoming packet from the Internet will be blocked, unless it is a reply to a request that originated from the local network (eg downloading a web page).
Back to top of page
IPS
Intrusion Prevention System: a set of procedures used to counter attempts to compromise a computer system, or to bypass its security mechanisms. Network traffic passing through the firewall is analysed and attacks identified by matching traffic patterns to well-known signatures stored in a local database. Intrusion attempts can then be stopped and the source of the traffic blacklisted.
Back to top of page
IPS-0 day
Intrusion Prevention System: "0-day" refers to unknown attacks, with pre-emptive signatures automatically created and pushed to the firewall in real time.
Back to top of page
BM
Bandwidth Management: the ability to guarantee bandwidth for certain services and users by prioritizing certain types of network traffic and implementing various thresholds.
Back to top of page
AV
Anti-Virus: the term 'virus' encompasses any malicious code carried in file downloads, eg as part of a web-page, FTP download or e-mail attachment.With the AV module enabled, files are inspected while being transferred through the firewall and data examined against a database of known virus patterns. If a virus is recognized in the contents of a file, the download can be terminated before it completes.
Back to top of page
WCF
Web Content Filtering: a powerful feature that enables the administrator to allow or block access to web sites automatically.When a user requests access to a web site, a query is sent to a global database of millions of web site URL addresses, grouped into categories such as shopping, news, adult-oriented etc… The user is then granted or denied access to the site based on the filtering policy in place for that category.
Back to top of page
IM/P2P
Instant Messaging/Peer-to-Peer application blocking: Instant Messaging and Peer-to-Peer applications can be useful but in the work environment may affect staff productivity, waste bandwidth and present security holes.
Back to top of page
ZoneDefense
A unique mechanism that integrates with xStack, D-Link’s range of business switches, in order to stop harmful network attacks from spreading through the network. See
how ZoneDefense works.
Back to top of page