Question About NSA 240 Security Services

[deejay33]

Hello All,

I purchased a NSA 240 last year and it came with 1 year subscription to Gateway Anti-Virus, Anti-Spyware and Intrusion Prevention Service as well as the Premium Content Filtering service. I am due up for renewal and have two questions.

1. If I do not renew do the services disable or do I just stop getting updates? I am leaning toward letting the Premium Content Filtering Service go since it was not a requirement in our firewall spec and I only have it cause it was included free.

2. How much extra protection are we actually getting from the Intrusion Prevention Services? I am looking at our logs and mostly see a bunch of Alert type notifications for valid apps. Things like "Symantec Live Update Client Update" and "Google Safe Browsing -- Traffic 1". I do see a hand full of "Possible Port Scan" notifications. Are those being blocked or am I just notified? Is it doing more that I am not seeing in the logs?

Thanks for your help/opinions on this,

Daniel

 

[joepc]

if you you let the services expire then the serices will just disable thems and no longer work.

ips ca be very helpful from a security perspective but it relative to what your needs are. for instance you can block instant messaging which can be a pathway for a virus etc. you can block terminal serives sessions, streaming video, audio,etc. if you crank up the settings then it will add a lot to your security. however when you do that you can loose functionality. so it really comes down to how badly you want to crank up your security. if you were a bank you would definately want something like this. if you are working on a five user basic small business network then maybe not such a big deal.