“While Checkpoint issues service pack to address
vulnerabilities, hackers warn against placing too much faith in
firewalls.”
“An audience of several hundred network security professionals
watched with rapt attention last week as a trio of hackers
repeatedly penetrated one of the industry’s most trusted and
popular firewall products–Checkpoint Software’s Firewall-1.
The demonstration, presented at the “Black Hat” security
conference in Las Vegas, challenged the widely accepted notion that
firewalls are largely immune to direct attack.“
“The panel–John McDonald and Thomas Lopatic of German security
firm Data Protect GmbH and Dug Song of the University of
Michigan–identified three general categories of firewall attacks.
They began by demonstrating a number of relatively simple
techniques by which an attacker could impersonate an authorized
administrator, and thus gain access to the firewall application
itself. A second type of attack tricked the firewall into believing
an unauthorized Internet connection was actually an authorized
virtual private network connection. Finally, the panel exploited a
number of errors in the process used to examine traffic passing
through the firewall to sneak in dangerous commands.”