Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Unleashed

Understanding the Growing Need for Application Layer Filtering

Nearly all organizations with a presence on the Internet have put some type of packet-filtering firewall technology into place to protect the internal network resources from attack. These types of packet-filter firewall technologies were useful in blocking specific types of network traffic, such as vulnerabilities that utilize the RPC protocol, by simply blocking TCP and UDP ports that the RPC protocol would use. Other ports, on the other hand, were often left wide open to support certain functionality, such as the TCP 80 or 443 ports, utilized for HTTP and HTTPS web browsing and for access to SharePoint. As previously mentioned, a packet-filter firewall is only able to inspect the ...