PC Security Journal

Gaining Access to a Check Point Appliance – Physical Access Trumps All by Tom Kopchak Recently, one of my co-workers and I were tasked with reconfiguring a Check Point Appliance for use as the main firewall in a lab environment we are building for some internal testing. Because we both are recent hires (and thus, the low men on the totem pole), we were not given passwords to the devices or any other useful information regarding their previous configuration. We were expected to learn how to manage the devices, reload the Check Point software, and configure the equipment entirely from scratch. Unfortunately, the Check Point devices refused to play nicely and cooperate with our mission, instead insisting on throwing fatal exceptions whenever we attempted to reload the software. With our attempts to reload and configure the devices properly crippled, we were forced to se... (more)

F5’s Certified Firewall Protects Against Large-Scale Cyber Attacks

F5 Networks on Tuesday announced that the latest release of the F5 BIG-IP product family has been certified by ICSA Labs as a network firewall, helping customers protect their public-facing websites from today’s massive cyber attacks. The newly certified solution handles eight times more traffic at the same cost of the closest competitor’s solution. “F5 provides an entirely new and more intelligent approach for defending public-facing web properties and DNS services against harmful attacks,” said Mark Vondemkamp, Director of Product Management at F5. “Many of the world’s largest... (more)

Catbird’s vSecurity 5.0

While virtualization offers many benefits to enterprise such as lower costs and greater flexibility, it also creates new challenges. One of the greatest concerns with switching over to virtualized infrastructure, espeically in government, is security and compliance in a complex and dynamic environment which legacy software can no longer handle. Catbird offers automated security solutions tailored to virtualized data centers and has recently unveilled the next generation of its vSecurity software, vSecurity 5.0. By integrating with the hypervisor, which manages all of the virtual ... (more)

F5 Friday: Goodbye Defense in Depth. Hello Defense in Breadth.

#adcfw #infosec F5 is changing the game on security by unifying it at the application and service delivery layer. Over the past few years we’ve seen firewalls fail repeatedly. We’ve seen business disrupted, security thwarted, and reputations damaged by the failure of the very devices meant to prevent such catastrophes from happening. These failures have been caused by a change in tactics from invaders who seek no longer to find away through or over the walls, but who simply batter it down instead. A combination of traditional attacks – network-layer – and modern attacks – applic... (more)

The Fundamental Problem with Traditional Inbound Protection

The past year brought us many stories focusing on successful attacks on organizations for a wide variety of reasons. Why an organization was targeted was not nearly as important as the result: failure to prevent an outage. While the volume of traffic often seen by these organizations was in itself impressive, it was not the always the volume of traffic that led to the outage, but rather what that traffic was designed to do: consume resources. It’s a story we’ve heard before, particularly with respect to web and application servers. We know that over-consumption of resources impair... (more)