My hosting company says IPTables is useless and doesn't provide any protection. Is this a lie?
TL;DR
I have two, co-located servers. Yesterday my DC company contacted me to tell me that because I'm using a software firewall my server is "Vulnerable to multiple, critical security threats" and my current solution offers "No protection from any form of attack".
They say I need to get a dedicated Cisco firewall ($1000 installation then $200/month each) to protect my servers. I was always under the impression that, while hardware firewalls are more secure, something like IPTables on RedHat offered enough protection for your average server.
Both servers are just web-servers, there's nothing critically important on them but I've used IPTables to lock down SSH to just my static IP address and block everything except the basic ports (HTTP(S), FTP and a few other standard services).
I'm not going to get the firewall, if ether of the servers were hacked it would be an inconvenience but all they run is a few WordPress and Joomla sites so I definitely don't think it's worth the money.
Answer
Hardware firewalls are running software too, the only real difference is that the device is purpose built and dedicated to the task. Software firewalls on servers can be just as secure as hardware firewalls when properly configured (note that hardware firewalls are generally 'easier' to get to that level, and software firewalls are 'easier' to screw up).
If you're running outdated software, there's likely a known vulnerability. While your server might be susceptible to this attack vector, stating that it is unprotected is inflammatory, misleading, or a boldface lie (depends on what exactly they said and how they meant it). You should update the software and patch any known vulnerabilities regardless of the probability of exploitation.
Stating that IPTables is ineffective is misleading at best. Though again, if the one rule is allow everything from all to all then yeah, it wouldn't be doing anything at all.
Side Note: all my personal servers are FreeBSD powered and use only IPFW (built-in software firewall). I have never had a problem with this setup; I also follow the security announcements and have never seen any issues with this firewall software.
At work we have security in layers; the edge firewall filters out all the obvious crap (hardware firewall); internal firewalls filter traffic down for the individual servers or location on the network (mix of mostly software and hardware firewalls).
For complex networks of any kind, security in layers is most appropriate. For simple servers like yours there may be some benefit in having a separate hardware firewall, but fairly little.
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