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TippingPoint sets new standard for intrusion prevention


Johannesburg, 10 Mar 2004

Secure Data, a member of the JSE-listed ERP.com Group, and the African distributor for TippingPoint Technologies, today announced new capabilities for the latter's UnityOne Intrusion Prevention Systems, that unleashes the power of intrusion prevention by extending its best-of-breed, Layer 2-7 Application Protection with powerful Performance Protection and Infrastructure Protection features.

"TippingPoint is re-defining intrusion prevention," commented TippingPoint's CEO Kip McClanahan. "Intrusion prevention requires the ability to protect bandwidth and performance, the network infrastructure itself, as well as applications at Layers 2-7. Today's attacks target each of these three business-critical areas, and only TippingPoint offers customers a complete, intelligent solution. Our customers demand uncompromising performance, reliability and protection."

UnityOne Performance Protection capabilities enable customers to throttle non-mission critical applications that hijack valuable bandwidth and IT resources, thereby aligning network resources and business-critical application performance. By rate limiting applications such as peer-to-peer file sharing and instant messaging, network resources for business-critical applications like e-mail, database transactions and voice over IP (VoIP) are protected. Rogue applications can consume massive amounts of bandwidth. The ability to set policies that reclaim bandwidth results in an immediate return on investment.

"Once we implemented TippingPoint's performance protection filters, we saw a 40% increase in bandwidth availability," added Ronnie Wagers, network systems and security officer at the University of Dayton. "TippingPoint eliminated the need for us to purchase additional bandwidth, resulting in immediate cost savings."

TippingPoint's UnityOne Infrastructure Protection capabilities protect against denial of service attacks, SYN flood attacks and process table floods. This feature also protects routers, switches, DNS and other critical infrastructure such as VoIP from targeted attacks and traffic anomalies. Sophisticated algorithms within UnityOne can baseline normal traffic allowing for automatic thresholds and throttling to protect against denial of service and unknown, zero-day attacks.

"Our UnityOne arrived on site when we were having firewall problems due to a high level of ICMP traffic," continued Kirk Kelly, Pima County Community College's Director of Network Services. "We quickly installed the UnityOne outside of the firewall and it immediately began blocking the offensive traffic. The UnityOne protected the firewall and continued to perform under extreme load conditions."

The UnityOne protects both perimeter and internal network segments. Internal protection is necessary to prevent attacks from within such as 'walk-in' worms that are carried past the perimeter on an infected laptop. The UnityOne's gigabit throughput and microsecond latency are required to protect high-speed connections at the network core.

"UnityOne protects us from internal and external threats," concluded Jacada's MIS Manager Ronny Nussbaum. "We placed the device in front of the firewall where it relieves the load on the firewall and blocks malicious traffic We've also had several cases where someone came in with their Welchia-infected or ad-ware infested laptop, and UnityOne notified me immediately. I love this product! We've experienced bandwidth savings of approximately 30%."

The UnityOne Security Management System (SMS) has been enhanced to easily manage these new capabilities. The new functionality consists of advanced reporting features, added bandwidth shaping functionality, and more intuitive usability combined with a new graphical user interface.

In a recent multi-vendor IPS evaluation, The NSS Group report stated, "We found the TippingPoint management system to be the most usable overall. The interface was intuitive, policy management was excellent, and the alert handling, analysis and reporting were all flexible, powerful, and yet very easy to use. The Policy Editor is the best we have seen on any IDS/IPS device."

The UnityOne Intrusion Prevention System is based on TippingPoint's patent-pending custom-ASIC Threat Suppression Engine (TSE). The TSE supports a broad range of attack filtering mechanisms including signatures to detect known attack types, protocol anomalies to detect RFC violations, application anomalies to protect application vulnerabilities, and traffic anomalies for zero-day protection against unknown attacks. This powerful technology is highly scalable and extensible. The added Performance Protection and Infrastructure Protection capabilities deliver great value to TippingPoint customers and set a new standard for Intrusion Prevention Systems.

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TippingPoint Technologies

TippingPoint Technologies, based in Austin, Texas, USA, is the leading provider of network-based intrusion prevention systems that deliver in-depth protection and attach eradication for corporate enterprises, government agencies, service providers and academic institutions. Their innovative approach offers customers an effective network-based security solution with unrivalled economics, ultra-high performance, scalability and reliability.

Secure Data

SecureData, an ERP.com company, is Africa's Premier IT Security Solution Provider. SecureData's solutions incorporate Antivirus and Content Security, Network Security, Intrusion Detection software, and Network Asset Management. SecureData's comprehensive "Managed Security Services" include design, audit, implementation, outsourcing and hosting. SecureData distributes, sells and supports category leading IT security products to the public, corporate and SME sectors throughout Africa as well as products and services to the SOHO and consumer markets through partnerships with ISPs. As well as being the sole distributor in Sub-Saharan Africa for and Trend Micro, SecureData is the African distributor for USA-based TippingPoint Technologies and the Southern African distributor for USA-based BorderWare, USA-based RSA Security and UK-based Centennial. For more information, visit SecureData at www.sd.co.za

ERP.com

ERP.com is a JSE-listed company focused on the implementation, integration and management of enterprise applications in an e-business environment. For more information, visit ERP.com at www.erpcom.co.za

Editorial contacts

Paul Booth
Global Research Partners
(082) 568 1179
pabooth@mweb.co.za
Dean Brazier
SecureData
(011) 257 8600
deanb@sd.co.za