Securing IM and P2P Applications for the Enterprise

As an IT Professional, you know that the majority of the workstations on your network now contain IM and P2P applications that you did not select, test, install, or configure. As a result, malicious hackers, as well as virus and worm writers are targeting these inadequately secured applications for attack This book will teach you how to take back control of your workstations and reap the benefits provided by these applications while protecting your network from the inherent dangers.

Employees of all levels within your company now rely on IM as much as e-mail as a mission-critical business communication tool. And, P2P offers some intriguing possibilities for legitimate collaboration and data sharing. However, neither of these applications was designed to carry sensitive data in an enterprise environment. As a result, both applications are vulnerable to countless threats including viruses, worms, hoaxes, adware, and spam (or SPIM). In addition they can gobble up both network bandwidth and employee productivity at an alarming rate. And both create potentially serious liability issues by exposing proprietary, copyrighted, or classified data to the outside world or by unknowingly bringing someone else’s equally sensitive data back onto your company’s network.

This book will teach you how to take back control of your workstations and reap the benefits provided by these applications while protecting your network from the inherent dangers. You will learn to configure many security devices including firewalls, routers, switches, intrusion detection systems, intrusion prevention systems, and servers to monitor and block potentially malicious IM and P2P traffic. The book will also detail the most current versions of enterprise IM and security applications specifically designed to monitor IM and P2P applications in corporate environments.