Today, the World Wide Web is used for information, commerce, news, weather, music, telephony, audio and video conferencing, database access, file sharing, with new features cropping up almost daily. Each has its own security concerns and weaknesses. The frequency and sophistication of Internet attacks have increased. These changes in the Internet community and its security needs prompted the first bona fide defense measures. The network must be protected from outside attacks that could cause loss of information, breakdowns in network integrity, or breaches in security. As the Internet has matured, however, so have the threats to its safe use, and so must the security paradigms used to enable business use of the Internet. This paper summarizes a multi-dimensional approach (which is mandatory these days to discourage ever-more sophisticated threats to the network) to security in the present scenario as against a single-dimensional approach, which is no longer adequate, and very much a popular target to attack.