Using the Police to Watch for Bad Guys

Using the Police to Watch for Bad Guys

Even with neighborhood watch programs, communities still have the police. Although the police can't stay in your neighborhood all day long, they can do a bunch of things to prevent crime, as well as to prevent crimes from recurring. They can arrest suspects and question them, look into their criminal records, and prosecute them as necessary. The police can go to great lengths to prevent future crimes, in part by looking at how past crimes were committed and stopping similar crimes in the future.

Firewalls prevent the types of flows that are known to be potentially harmful. However, firewalls do let packets into and out of an enterprise network. So, in addition to a firewall, networks need other security tools. These tools watch for known patterns of illegal network activityactivity that is intended to look like normal activity so that it can get past the firewall. In the next two sections, you'll read about a couple of tools that watch for trends, compare those to known illegal network activity, and do something to prevent problems as a result of the activity.