Secure Computing Corporation is now offering Geo-Location, a secure firewall formerly known as Sidewinder. This service allows organizations to create policies that block connections by an IP
address (for any network protocol/application), based on country code information.
The first-of-its-kind firewall
provides organizations the ability to reduce their exposure to attacks by shrinking the size of the Internet. Geo-Location does this by blocking or allowing the organization to apply additional in-depth application filtering on all traffic from countries that they do not do business with, or that are known originators of malicious hacking.
By implementing Secure Firewall Geo-Location organizations could reduce threat exposure as it defines policies that rely on a combination of IP address reputation as well as country code.
The new technology prevents employees from visiting malware infected Web sites hosted in countries blocked by the Secure Firewall and Geo-Location policy. Also it reduces traffic volume and therefore bandwidth requirements on public-facing Web, application and remote access servers, which don't have to process these unwanted connections from countries which the organization has disallowed.
Secure Computing's Secure Firewall is setting a new standard for proactive threat detection by integrating TrustedSource (
News -
Alert) and the new Geo-Location technology into every firewall. The combination of TrustedSource reputation-based policy and Geo-Location country policy can be used with existing firewall policies such as anti-virus, IPS signatures, and application layer filtering to further reduce the company's exposure and prevent attacks.
"The Secure Firewall's ability to filter connections based on the country code of an IP address enables our clients to significantly reduce virus and malware threats from high risk areas they would normally not be doing business with," said Preston Hogue, Chief Security Officer of Network Computing Architects, Inc. "We have several clients and prospects that see this as a tremendous new way to enhance their network security and reduce the load on their perimeter defense controls."
IDC (
News -
Alert) research director Charles Kolodgy explained that threat and traffic reduction are mutually desirable outcomes and, because unwanted and malicious traffic often comes from parts of the world where customers have no legitimate business interests, managing traffic can offers a variety of benefits — including reducing the burden of mail archiving and ensuring compliance.
“Geo-Location technology potentially provides these benefits by allowing enterprises to filter connections at the firewall perimeter based on the country location," Kolodgy said. "This control, in conjunction with TrustedSource reputation filtering, can provide a heightened layer of protection. These capabilities are greatly expanding what network security devices can do, which is part of the growing trend for Extensible Threat Management (XTM)."
Arun Satapathy is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of Arun’s articles, please visit his columnist page.
Internet Protocol (IP) | X |
| IP stands for Internet Protocol, a data-networking protocol developed throughout the 1980s. It is the established standard protocol for transmitting and receiving data
in packets over the Internet. I...more |
Firewall | X |
| This is called a Stateful Inspection for a firewall to check, alert or audit the status (state) of the TCP connection - SYN, SYN-ACK or FIN. In other words, this is what a firewall does, check for co...more |
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