How to upgrade your network security with our free firewall

The router and firewall is a critical piece of equipment in your network. It connects you to the outside world while also acting as your first line of defence against intruders. If your firewall gets compromised things get ugly – fast.

I want to share a little tip – did you know that we offer an amazing alternative to cheap consumer grade Internet routers?

The difference is, our software is enterprise class, fully maintained and free. Here’s how you can try our Sophos UTM Home Edition and our free Sophos UTM Essential Firewall for businesses.

If you think you need to be truly “unlucky” to be targeted – try putting an unshielded Windows computer or a web server on the Internet and watch it being probed within seconds. This is not a matter of misfortune; it’s a matter of seconds.

Being such a critical piece of equipment you might think firewalls all come as cast iron, industrial strength appliances. But, as has been apparent, this is not the case.

Many times the software is not maintained on these devices. Some are not made to update automatically, or are difficult to upgrade. Or the vendor has simply stopped maintaining the software.

Let me give you some examples security weaknesses we’ve seen recently.

• Admin access: this is the holy grail. Anyone can go in a reconfigure your router.
• UPnP – an autoconfiguring standard to allow devices on your network to open up ports in your firewall

The good news is that the Sophos UTM Essential Firewall (for businesses) and Sophos UTM Home Edition address all the issues I’ve mentioned above.

• We continuously maintain and update the software for it. This means we can make continuous improvements and quickly address any issues.
• We don’t support UPnP so it will never be an issue
• You get remote access so you can access you home network wherever you are without having to open any ports on the firewall

Try our Sophos UTM Home Edition, and our free Sophos UTM Essential Firewall for businesses.

You can choose how you deploy it:

• Use an existing standard PC with at least two network cards
• Install it as a VM in your virtual environment
• Buy a hardware appliance from us
• Or you can geek out completely and even run it in the Amazon EC2 cloud … the possibilities are endless

More firewall tips and tricks

Over the next few weeks we’ll be giving you more tips for making sure your firewall gets you maximum security. Come back to Sophos Blog for our continuing series …