Server Security

From airports to restaurants, where ever people gather, security has become the watchword of the day. This is just as true where people gather on-line as it is in the physical world.

Security and reliability are the reasons we have selected Macintosh servers for Web hosting. Our basic Web site serving is performed on the same configuration used in the Naval Undersea Warfare Center. Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology selected this configuration as the most secure available. This is also the configuration to which the U.S. Army turned following an embarrassing hacking incident involving their Windows NT servers. No server currently available has demonstrated a higher level of security. Several other (classified) military sites use the same combination for the same reason.

Physical access to our servers is restricted. All servers are behind a firewall to protect against intrusion from the internet. There is no dial-in access to any server. Specific filters are written to allow internet access only to public services (i.e.: view Web pages; send e-mail). FTP access is user name and password protected and is typically restricted to a single source IP address. Users are restricted to their own directories (folders) on a need only basis. Access to every function is logged and the logs are archived in a safety deposit box with the backup files for each server.

Virus Protection

There are currently tens of thousands of viruses on the Windows platform with more being discovered each day. There are approximately forty viruses that have been discovered for the Mac Operating System. While we do run virus protection software that automatically checks for new virus descriptions daily, we feel that the data on our servers is much more secure than if we were running Windows servers with their well known and highly exploitable vulnerabilities.