PIX and Worms

[newmarket25]

My network has a PIX515E at the perimeter. I hear about these worms that can affect MSoft OS's. Can these worms make it through the PIX, considering that we are doing NAT? I can see a worm affecting a machine with a real IP address attached to the net, but I am wondering how likely a worm could get thru the firewall and attach to a non-routable IP address based PC? (I am still going to install the Msoft patches, I am just wondering is all.)

[pkhatri]

Hi,

You've gotta remember that worms may not have anything to do as far as the network layer is concerned. If a worm propagates at the application layer, it does not really matter whether you are doing NAT or not e.g. if your internal machines are allowed HTTP access to the Internet, they are susceptible to worms and other security vulnerabilities that propagate through HTTP. The same applies to worms propagating through email.

So yeah, I strongly recommend that you install all relevant Microsoft patches :-)

Paresh

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