Check Point Software Technologies today (Tuesday)
introduced its Next Generation (NG) software with application
Intelligence (AI) feature for its firewall products.
Despite its software-based firewall approach, Check Point is
joining the ranks of hardware firewall suppliers with
application-focused protection aspirations.
Integrated into its Check Point FireWall-1 NG and Smart Defense
products, application intelligence helps administrators target and
prevent application attacks by validating standards compliance,
overseeing protocol usage, blocking malicious code and controlling
unauthorised operations, said Greg Smith, director of product
marketing at Check Point.
Features incorporated into Check Point NG with AI include worm
pattern matching for Common Internet File System (Cifs),
peer-to-peer support, fingerprint scrambling to block servers from
hackers and cross-site scripting protection.
"Customers have come to rely on a firewall to protect the
network. Now that the threat element has elevated to the
application, firewalls need to step up," Smith said.
Designed primarily for network-level access control, firewall
security policies often expose applications through Port 80 (HTTP)
and Port 443 (SSL).
Without a mechanism to filter and make intelligent decisions on
what to do with traffic, users are defenceless, said Scott Loach,
senior information security engineer at Raymond James Financial. He
says his financial services firm is running Check Point NG AI on
six large, corporate firewall clusters distributed worldwide.
"Today’s attacks are coming in on well-known ports that everyone
has open to the internet," Loach said. "[Threats] are not going to
sneak in your back door. They’re going to come into something
permitted."
Exacerbating the problem, analysts said, is that many customers
are unwilling to invest in multiple-point products to combat these
attacks.
The new management capabilities within Check Point NG AI will
ease volumes of log data that have overrun IT administrators in the
past, said Eric Ogren, senior analyst in security solutions and
services at Yankee Group.
"Right now the concept is internal firewalls to protect the
application environment. But when [VoIP] becomes more prevalent,
securing that at the network perimeter is tricky," he said.
Check Point NG with AI will be available in June.