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 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)
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)
#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 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)