RE: Opinions on VPN?

[John McDonald <Johnm () Networkguys com>]

Cisco routers are a joke when it comes to security and encrypting data.
We've run multiple security audits on all of Cisco's "security"
equipment with the same results. Penetration or unauthorized privileges
in under 15 minutes. It's marketing hype. Real VPN's are engineered by
companies such as TimeStep, VPNet, RADGuard, and Check Point. These
products DO NOT ALLOW ACCES to the hardware itself. This is the major
downfall of the Cisco products. They are meant to be routers and NOT
VPN's or Firewalls.


John D. McDonald 

Phone: 510.713.8880 ext. 306 
Fax:      510.713.3456 
E-mail: JohnM () NetworkGuys com
Web:    www.NetworkGuys.com

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                -----Original Message-----
                From:   Jan B. Koum  [mailto:jkb () best com]
                Sent:   Saturday, April 17, 1999 6:26 PM
                To:     firewall-wizards () nfr net
                Subject:        Opinions on VPN?

                eSafe Protect Gateway (tm) has scanned this mail for 
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                        Hi folks,

                        Just wanted to find out what other people
opinion on 'VPN' as a
                general idea? IMHO, the person who came up with the VPN
idea should be
                shot, because in most cased all VPN do is create entry
points into your
                network (in most cased right past the firewall and some
times in the
                hear of your network). They also give admins false sence
of security:
                the data is encrypted. But if 'rm -rf /' or 'cp
porn.html index.html'
                command -- so what?! That command (traffic) is still
there!

                        Am I alone in the opinion that VPN mostly suck
or is it just
                because I tend to run into a lot of misconfigured cisco
routers which
                do encrypt data, but also route packets from others into
your net :(

                -- Yan