PC & Network Security

Data Security

Back-ups to protect your whole computer

Back-ups to protect your documents

Data Recovery if unprotected data is lost

You need to maintain your data's integrity and security. You need to make sure that undesirable web content is not accessed at your home or business.

Protect your kids, keep your data private, protect your business safe from lawsuits.

This means your PC and your networks vulnerabilities need to be covered. 3 important things you need to do

To protect your network and your data's privacy you need a great firewall. To keep unwanted web sites from being accessed you need great content filtering. To protect yourself from not being able to recover lost filers you need off-site backup.

VPN / Firewall security devices

S. I. Tech Services is proud to be partnered with Snap Gear to install & support these fine products.

Security
Peace of mind through a stateful firewall, content filtering, anti-intrusion defenses and event logging.

VPN
Both PPTP and IPSec VPN as standard in all models without user restrictions. Whether you're linking offices or allowing access to remote workers you don't need expensive third-party software add-ons.

Interoperability
Snap Gear products interoperate with almost all leading VPN software and appliance vendors. A Snap Gear solution snaps into your network seamlessly.

Reliability
The engineering excellence that goes into Snap Gear products means a richness of features, high performance, long life and stability.

Security and access to the Internet with the powerful Snap Gear family of business appliances. Whether you have one computer or an entire enterprise Snap Gear provides broadband access sharing, firewall protection, VPN, and an amazing number of features that will save you time and money.

See rave reviews of the SnapGear family of VPN firewall routers.

Connection Sharing (unlimited users)
Port Forwarding
NAT/Masquerading (static and dynamic)
DNS Masquerading (simplifies management by removing the need to configure DNS for all computers on the LAN, and provides DNS resolution through a VPN tunnel)
IP Aliases
DHCP Client and Server
NTP Client and Server (syncs to atomic clocks with NTP protocol)
PPP (authentication such as PAP, CHAP, MS CHAPv2)
PPPoE (eg for ADSL)
Stateful Firewall (protects against denial of service and spoofing)
Anti-Intrusion (automatic blocking of probes and attacks, logs suspicious activity)
Logging (local and remote, packet logging)
Traffic Shaping (allows you to give priority to specific traffic and protocols such as interactive sessions or e-mail)
Routing
VPN - PPTP (v2 client and server, MPPE 40 to 128-bit RC4 encryption, also pass-through mode)
PPTP Tunnels
VPN - IPSec (full peer-to-peer as initiate or terminate; ESP, AH payloads; DES 56-bit and 3DES 168-bit ciphers; IKE, Diffie-Helman key exchange; authentication up to 512-bit for RSA key signatures; pre-shared secrets; hashes HMAC - MD5, SHA)
Fail-over from broadband to narrowband and fail-forward
IPSec Tunnels
Web Management
Free firmware Updates
90 Day Installation Support
One Year Warranty (Except where required to be 2 years by law)
Optional Upgrade to Four Year Warranty
Dial on demand
Telnet
RAS (dial in)
RADIUS/TACACS+
Hardware Cryptographic Acceleration
Integrated V.90 Modem
Computers on LAN
3DES Performance (IPSec), suitable for all corresponding broadband speeds
Installation support
Worldwide e-mail support
Telephone support (USA only)
Unlimited incidents
Configuration only (not architecture/topology)
Free for all customers for 90 days from purchase
Extended Four Year Warranty (USA price only)
Annual Support (USA price only)
Content Filtering
with or w/o Logging

VPN Interoperability
Snap Gear VPN technology is highly compatible with all of the main commercial VPN implementations. The PPTP aspect is entirely compatible with Microsoft Windows®. Similarly, the IPSec functionality has worked with the following systems:

• Cisco eg 1720, 2600 series, 3600 series, 4000 series, AS5300 series, 7200 series, 7500 series
• Nortel (Bay Networks) Contivity Switch
• Watchguard
• SonicWall
• Netscreen
• Asita Technologies Products
• Raptor Firewall
• Gauntlet Firewall GVPN
• Checkpoint Firewall-1
• F-Secure VPN for Windows
• Xedia Access Point/QVPN
• PGP Macintosh and Windows IPSec Client
• Windows 2000
• Numerous other Windows clients
• IRE Safenet/SoftPK
• Timestep
• Shiva/Intel LANrover
• Sun Solaris
• Radguard

Maybe you have children at home and would rather they not stumble into one of the darker corners of the web.

Perhaps an employee is opening you up to a law suit by viewing pornography at his desk or wasting time shopping at auction sites.

The web is full of inappropriate places to visit. Either way you should read on about our content filtering options.

Conserve precious network bandwidth resources Reduce legal liability Boost employee productivity Enforce your existing Internet access policy

The Problem The Solution Why SI Tech Services? Case Studies Pricing & Availability FAQ

The Problem ...

It's no surprise that misuse of the company's Internet connection is one of the biggest ways employees waste time while at work making the Internet a powerful double-edged sword for both productivity gains and losses.

• 30 to 40% of Internet surfing during work hours is not business related (IDC)
• As much as 70% of a company's bandwidth is being consumed by non-productive pursuits (IDC)
• 68% of all Internet pornography traffic occurs during the 9-to-5 workday (SexTracker)

  Note that last statistic if you have children at home!

All of this translates to one thing - the business must foot the bill.

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Frequently Asked Questions about our URL content filtering

Is the URL Content Filtering Service provided by S. I. Tech Services or by a third-party?

Our products use filtering services provided by Cerberian Inc. This is transparent to customers who may see Cerberian branded pages in the reporting options. Each VPN firewall appliance is capable of acting as a filtering agent with optional logging information stored on the secure Cerberian server infrastructure.

As a S. I. Tech Services customer do I need to deal with Cerberian?

No, we provide all of the infrastructure required to provide you with a total solution.

What URL content filtering options are available? What is the licensing structure?

You have the choice of Picket (filtering only) or Eminence (filtering and reporting). Each is available for 5, 20, 50, and 100 user configurations. Charges for use of the service apply. Licenses are generally valid for one year at a time.

What do you do with my organization's traffic information? Do you ever sell or make usage statistics available to outside sources?

Cerberian stores all data in secure Data Centers and never sells or releases any customer information. The Web Filter stores your organization's URL ratings request in the reporting database so you can generate and view reports on your users surfing patterns. Cerberian stores the username, the URL, and the action taken (allow, permit, or monitor). This information belongs to you, and neither S. I. Tech Services, SnapGear Inc. (the VPN firewall appliance manufacturer) or Cerberian sells this information or publishes usage statistics related to your organization's traffic patterns.

How secure is my information on Cerberian? How do you secure rating requests across the Internet? Who has access to our data?

Cerberian provides SSL or VPN connections to secure your data across the internet. Only your authorized users have access to your data through a password protected web site. Devices access the Cerberian service using Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) encryption to protect the data transmitted between the device and the Cerberian Lookup Appliance. This means that before transmitting sensitive data from your computer to our server, the data is "scrambled," thereby preventing anyone monitoring the transmission from extracting the encrypted data. Once the data arrives at our data center, our server then "de-scrambles" and processes the data. All information, personal or otherwise, collected by our service resides in our secure data centers. We strictly limit access to the computers that contain the database, and no one individual has access to all of the information at any one time. In order to keep your information as secure as possible, we do not disclose any specifics about the hardware, software used, or the location of such equipment.

In addition, communications between a device and the Lookup Appliance could occur across a virtual private network (VPN). Such a dedicated connection would guarantee security of transmitted data and a guaranteed bandwidth available for communication with the data center at the expense of greater infrastructure needs.

Is your administration web site secure?

Only authorized users with the correct username and password can access your data. Only your authorized users (system administrators, administrators, and managers) have access to your organization data. Your users must first provide a valid login name and password before the Cerberian administration web sever grants access to your organization data. All connections to the administration web server use SSL encryption to protect your data.

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How many URLs does the Cerberian database contain?

The Cerberian database contains about 5.5 million URLs. Because Cerberian rates sites at the domain or directory level, the database actually covers 400 to 500 million unique web pages.

How accurate is the Cerberian rating process?

Cerberian rates 93% of the URLs requested by looking up the rating in the database. The remaining requests go through the Dynamic Real-Time Ratings service, which generates the correct rating for 88% of the requests.

Of all the requests received by the Lookup Appliances, the ratings database already has ratings for 93% of all requests. The remaining requests get rated on the fly by the Dynamic Real-Time Rating service. If end-users get blocked from accessing a page by the local policy, they have the option of requesting that Cerberian review the categories assigned to that page. Of the URLs reviewed by Cerberian's hand raters, 12% needed recategorization, or fewer than 0.01% of the overall rating requests resulted in incorrect ratings.

How often does Cerberian update the database?

Cerberian continuously updates the ratings database, and Cerberian's outsourced model does not require customers to update a local database.

Unlike other Internet content filtering solutions, Cerberian's outsourced solution does not require clients to receive large database updates daily or weekly. Instead, Cerberian customers all access the same ratings database. When a user requests a URL not contained in the database, the Cerberian solution uses Dynamic Real-time Rating to assign a rating to that page. The database then stores that rating, which becomes immediately available to all Cerberian customers. Cerberian also continually validates the URLs in the database to ensure that when web sites change, the database accurately rates the new content.

How do you locate sites to block?

You select which categories of information you want to block. Cerberian provides only category ratings for Web sites.

Cerberian's service does not determine which sites to block. Cerberian assigns one or more category ratings to requested pages. Access to web pages then proceeds based on the policies you set for content categories.

Do humans review the web sites?

Cerberian uses expert raters to train the database.

Initially, category experts create a list of URLs that represent good content for each category. The ratings database then uses this initial set of pages to recognize content similar to those initial pages. Through a process called Content Vectoring, the database learns to better categorize pages as it rates more and more user requests. The Cerberian staff also continually adds new pages to all categories and evaluates any pages that the rating process could not recognize. Users can request Cerberian staff to rate specific new pages or review automatic ratings assigned by the database. Through this process, the database becomes more accurate at categorizing future user requests.

Do humans review the ratings?

Cerberian's expert raters periodically review each content area. They also examine pages based on categorization requests from end-users.

Cerberian periodically reviews certain content areas to fine tune the ability of the ratings database to recognize specific types of content. Also, when users believe a page has received an incorrect rating, a Cerberian rating expert will review the categories assigned and make changes as necessary. Cerberian also uses the human-rated sites to further train and improve the content vectoring system.

How many and what categories do you provide?

Cerberian's Internet management software currently recognizes the following 55 customizable categories:

Potentially Liable & Objectionable Content Categories

• Adult/Mature Content
• Alcohol/Tobacco
• Criminal/Illegal Skills
• Drugs
• Gambling
• Hacking/Proxy Avoidance Systems
• Hate/Racism
• Illegal Drugs
• Intimate Apparel/Swimsuit
• Nudism
• Pornography
• Sex Education
• Violence
• Weapons

Potential Non-Productive Categories

• Abortion Advocacy
• Activist/Advocacy Groups
• Advertisement
• Arts/Entertainment
• Business & Economy
• Cult/Occult
• Cultural Institutions
• Dynamic Hosts
• Education
• Educational Cheating
• Educational Institutions
• Freeware/Software Downloads
• Games
• Gay & Lesbian Issues
• Glamour
• Government
• Health
• Humor/Jokes
• Information Technology/Computers
• Internet Auctions
• Job Search
• Kids Friendly
• Military
• Miscellaneous
• MP3/Streaming
• News & Media
• Online Banking
• Online Brokerage & Trading
• Pay to surf sites
• Personals & Dating
• Political Groups
• Real Estate
• Recreation & Hobbies
• Reference
• Religion
• Restaurants and Dining
• Search Engines and Portals
• Shopping
• Society & Lifestyle
• Sports
• Travel
• Vehicles
• Web Communications
• Web Hosting

How does the Cerberian solution deal with words that have multiple meanings (that is, words that have both an innocent meaning and a less appropriate meaning?)

The Cerberian Web Filter uses content vectoring to look at words in context to determine the rating for a page. Our ratings database uses a proprietary content vectoring technology that not only looks at the words on a page, but looks at how the word on the page relate to each other. With this technology, pages dealing with chicken breast recipes, discussions of breast cancer, and images of naked human breast get categorized into separate, appropriate categories.

How do you handle sites cached at search engines such as Google?

Cerberian rates cache pages as unique URLs. The Cerberian Internet management solution rates pages based on the URL. Since cached pages in Google have unique URLs, the ratings database stores ratings for these cached pages as if they were any other page on the Internet.

How does the Cerberian solution handle dynamically generated sites?

Cerberian uses Dynamic Real-Time Rating service to accurately categorize dynamic content. Because the Cerberian Internet management solution provides Dynamic Real-Time Rating technology, most dynamic sites receive the correct rating. Our database continually reviews the ratings of stored URLs to ensure that the content has not changed.

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What size organizations can use the Cerberian Web Filter?

Any size organization can use the Cerberian Web Filter. Any size organization with a connection to the Internet can benefit from outsourcing its Internet monitoring and filtering with the Cerberian Web Filter. Cerberian services can integrated with many agents ranging from desktop firewalls to carrier-class routers.

Can distributed organizations use the Cerberian Web Filter?

Distributed organizations can especially benefit from the Cerberian Web Filter through central management and the Cerberian Report Service.

Each location would install a Cerberian-powered device (such as S.I. Tech Services' network appliances). Each device communicates with the nearest Cerberian Lookup Appliance to get URL ratings and to optionally access user policy information. IT managers can administer and monitor their organization's Internet usage from any location.

How many users can the Cerberian Web Filter solution support?

Cerberian will provide the necessary hardware to support all customer demand. User capacity depends on the overall capacity of the appliance or application that has integrated the Cerberian Web Filter. The Cerberian solution adds a very small overhead on the integrated device.

Cerberian provides the ratings database through many globally distributed service points called Lookup Appliances. For ISP/MSP applications, integrators can locally host a Lookup Appliance. A single Lookup Appliance can handle around 2,000 requests per second. Each of the Cerberian data centers has several load-balanced Lookup Appliances. Cerberian can quickly add additional capacity to its Lookup by simply adding an additional server to the Lookup Appliance. One additional server adds the capacity to service an additional 100,000 to 200,000 users.

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What happens if the Cerberian servers go down?

Devices will attempt to contact a redundant server. After a certain configurable time period, the agent device will allow the user's request if it has not received a response from the Lookup Appliance.

Agent devices that integrate the Cerberian service have access to any of the geographically distributed Lookup Appliances on Tier-1 networks. Many of these agents might also have access to private Lookup Appliances provided by our OEM and ISP/MSP partners. If the primary Lookup Appliance does not respond, the device will attempt to contact a redundant server in another location. It is nearly impossible for all of the Lookup Appliances to fails at the same time. If for some reason, the agent cannot receive a response from any Lookup Appliance, the customer administrator can set the agent response to allow all or block all user requests.

Cerberian has also designed its service with web services standards that allow for any component to survive an outage of another component. For example, if the Lookup Appliances cannot contact a Cerberian data center, they continue to serve ratings and to collect log entries until they can once again communicate with a data center.

Does Cerberian have more than one data center? Is the Cerberian Web Filter geographically load balanced?

Cerberian provides several, geographically distributed data centers. Cerberian has Lookup Appliances (the servers that communicate with customer agent devices) in three United States locations (each peered on four tier-one provider networks). Cerberian is installing additional Lookup Appliances in the US and Japan (Tokyo and Osaka). Cerberian is in final negotiations with a tier-one provider in Europe to locate Cerberian servers there.

How does Cerberian secure the data centers?

Cerberian houses equipment only in secure, disaster-tolerant colocation facilities. Cerberian houses its data centers in highly secure, disaster tolerant facilities with redundant Internet connections. In addition, Cerberian services are hosted on IBM hardware and software for ultimate security, scalability, and reliability.

Can users ask Cerberian to review a rating?

Yes, customers can request an expert to review a page's rating. If users feel that a URL has received an incorrect rating, any Cerberian Web Filter user can request that one of Cerberian's rating experts review the rating for that page. Users can request a review either by clicking on the link provided on the blocked URL page or by visiting the Cerberian web site (http://www.cerberian.com).

Won't an outsourced solution increase my network latency for web requests?

Users typically see no increased latency for their Web requests. In most cases, the end user will not notice the difference between a request directly to an Internet site and a request processed through the Cerberian Web Filter. The local device issues a rating request to the Cerberian data center and a request for the target page from its web server in parallel. Typically, Cerberian Web Filter responds within 40 milliseconds, usually before the web server's response. If the web page does arrive before the response from Cerberian Web Filter, the device delays forwarding the page to the user until it receives the categorization response.

Cerberian Web Filter also provides for several optimizations. Users within an organization frequently visit the same sites, so many manufacturers choose to implement a local cache when integrating the Cerberian solution. The local cache can quickly evaluate frequently visited sites instead of having to send a request to the Cerberian data center. The Lookup Appliances also have a cache of frequently requested URLs so the appliance can respond without having to send a request to the database. If the Lookup Appliance cache does not contain the URL, then the appliance will query the database. And finally, if the database does not contain the requested URL, then the Dynamic Real-time Rating process will categorize the URL.

If the URL requires real-time rating, how much of a delay will end users see?

Dynamic Real-Time Rating take only a few seconds. The Dynamic Real-Time Rating service, which categorizes URLs on the fly, usually takes no more than a few seconds to rate the requested page and get a response back to the end-user.

How many simultaneous filtering requests can Cerberian handle?

Each Lookup Appliance can handle thousands of requests per second, and Cerberian will maintain sufficient Lookup Appliances to keep ahead of customer demand.

Each server in a Lookup Appliance can handle approximately 2,000 requests per second. Each Lookup Appliance has several load-balanced groups of servers to handle customer rating requests. Adding capacity is simply a matter of adding additional servers to each Lookup Appliance. Cerberian will also add additional Lookup Appliances in various geographic locations to increase capacity as needed.

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Who decides what content to block?

You select which categories of information you want to block. Cerberian provides only category ratings for Web sites. An administrator at your site sets up the policies that determine what material to block. When an end-user requests access to a URL, your local edge device requests a rating for that URL from a nearby Cerberian lookup appliance. The lookup appliance returns the rating categories to which the URL belongs. The Cerberian service will compare the ratings to your local policy for that particular user. If your policy allows the content categories for that page, then the end-user gets to view the page; otherwise, the user sees a block page letting the user know that the page contains material against local policy.

Can I have different policies in effect for different times of the day or week?

Yes, for each group you can have up to three different policies in effect at different times.

You can create policy profiles to allow different types of access at different times of day and for different days of the week. For example, you could allow more restrictive access during regular business hours, but grant a wider range of access after hours and on weekends.

Can I assign various administrators over my organization's groups?

An upcoming enhancement to the Cerberian Web Filter will provide this feature. You will be able to assign as many administrators as you need to delegate management of users and associated policies. Each administrator can manage users and policies and view reports. You can also create managers who can only view reports about user access and policy violations.

Who can generate and view reports?

Anyone with the administration username and password can view and generate reports. With our upcoming release of the Cerberian service, all users that you designate as system administrators, administrators, and managers can generate reports. These users can generate reports from any workstation with Internet access.

Can administrators manage policies remotely?

Administrators can manage your account from any computer with Internet access and the Internet Explorer Web browser. Administrators simply log in to the user-friendly administration site located either on Cerberian's servers or a local web server, depending on the solution installed at your location.

Do you require a dedicated management console or software package?

No, administrators can manage Internet monitoring and filtering from using any workstation with a web browser and an Internet connection.

How many policies can I create?

You can create as many policies as you need to manage your users and groups. You can assign up to three policies to each group. For each policy, you assign a policy profile that defines the day of the week and time of day you want to enforce a policy.

Can I create policies for groups of users?

Yes, you can create a policy and apply that policy to any number of users on your network. For example, you might want to create a fairly liberal policy for your Marketing department, but a more restrictive policy for your Shipping department.

Can I create a policy for single users?

Yes, you can create a policy that controls the access for just a single user. Because you apply policies to groups, you would have to create a group that contains just the one user to whom you want to apply the policy.

Can I create my own categories?

No, you create your policies from the 55 categories Cerberian provides. The Cerberian review database currently assigns one or more of 55 categories to requested URLs. We feel that these categories enable you to maintain good control over the types of material you will allow and block for your organization. We do have the ability to add additional categories if necessary, but user feedback has shown that too many categories creates an unreasonable burden on managers who have to decide what material to permit or block.

Can I override (block or allow) certain URLs regardless of the rating?

Yes, you can create overrides that supercede the ratings in the Cerberian database. Administrators can choose to creates lists of URLs that you will always allow or block from your location regardless of the categories those URLs would receive from the ratings database.

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Do you have any predefined reports? Can you segment reports by users and groups? Can you generate reports by time and location?

Cerberian provides numerous user-configurable reports. The Cerberian Internet management solution provides numerous predefined reports, such as Problem (Violation) Reports, Global Reports, Group Reports, Location Reports, Single User Reports, Top User Reports, and Category Reports. You can generate each of these reports for specific periods of time from just today up to the past 90 days.

Is reporting web-based?
Yes, you access reports through a secure Web interface. You generate and view reports using a web browser on a workstation connected to the Internet. Any users classified as system administrator, administrator, or manager can generate reports.