SOHO Security: A Technical Briefing
Alberto M. Bento · Journal of the Association for Information Systems · 2003
Small businesses and home offices (SOHO) are increasingly connected to the Internet through broadband networking (cable, DSL, wireless) twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week (24/7).Of course, neither small businesses, nor individuals working in their home offices, have the financial resources, or the technical expertise, to protect themselves as effectively as organizations with well-staffed Information Systems Departments.What can SOHO do?The answer to this question is the objective of this briefing, particularly aiming to provide materials for a class meeting on Security in the MBA core course in information systems.Security threats to SOHO are becoming a problem for mid to large-size organizations, too.Many of the security breaches in large-size organizations, as was the case recently at Microsoft, were in reality security breaches in the home office of their employees.DoS (Denial of Service) attack to large organization sites (CNN, Yahoo, etc) are done using zombies planted in home PCs using broadband networking.SOHO should be able to protect themselves using cheap firewalls (hardware and software), detect potential hazardous hacker activities, prevent the installation of backdoors and Trojans, and be able to remove back doors and Trojans from their systems.