Fortinet – a world leader in high-performance network security – announced a significant update to the company’s FortiOS network security operating system, along with new releases for integrated reporting, advanced threat protection (APT) and strong authentication.
These releases demonstrate Fortinet’s vision of extending the next-generation firewall (NGFW) to address the challenges facing today’s enterprises including increasingly complex cyber threats. As a result, Fortinet’s FortiGate appliances, which routinely deliver five times faster performance than competitive offerings, will deliver even greater performance and more security.
FortiOS 5 is the operating system foundation for the FortiGate platform and offers a broad range of world class security capabilities and configuration options.
Announced, FortiOS 5 now delivers:
* Significantly faster SSL inspection;
* Richer reporting with even more out-of-the-box reports and drill down capability from FortiAnalyser; and
* Tighter integration with FortiAuthenticator and FortiSandbox for seamless Strong Authentication and Advanced Threat Protection.
“Security leaders must address threats from rising SSL traffic,” wrote Jeremy D’hoinne and Adam Hils, research directors with Gartner.
They go on to write, “Less than 20% of organisations with a firewall, an intrusion prevention system (IPS) or a unified threat management (UTM) appliance decrypt inbound or outbound SSL traffic. Gartner believes that, in 2017, more than half of the network attacks targeting enterprises will use encrypted traffic to bypass controls, up from less than 5% today.”
“Enterprises today are clamouring for improved network visibility that includes deeper packet inspection and granular control over network access, traffic, content and use, and they want it without introducing bottlenecks into the real-world traffic flow,” says John Maddison, vice president of marketing for Fortinet.
“Today, Fortinet extends that capability with advanced threat protection and authentication, all from a single vendor and all orchestrated through a single management console.”
Today, the company released a FortiAnalyser 5 update and announced the upcoming FortiAnalyser-3500E. Software enhancements include a wider selection of prebuilt reports and greater drilldown capabilities for better visibility into network behaviour and tighter integration with the company’s FortiGate platform. In addition, the new FortiAnalyser-3500E will feature 24Tb (upgradable to 48Tb) of storage to meet the requirements of high volume enterprises.
The company also announced the enterprise-grade FortiAuthenticator-1000D, which provides multiple methods of authentication, including hardware, software, e-mail and SMS tokens to help enterprises move to a stronger, user-based authentication model in an increasingly BYOD world. The new appliance supports up to 10 000 users and integrates seamlessly with FortiGate appliances.
Today’s threat landscape includes increasingly sophisticated, highly targeted attacks (or advanced persistent threats) designed specifically to breach an individual or small set of organisations.
Use of traditional FortiGate NGFW technologies – firewall segmentation, IPS and antimalware strong in proactive detection, malicious application and Website filtering, Command and Control blocking, SSL Inspection and more—have a role to play in hardening defences.
However, at some point a really determined attacker is likely to get through, and even a single compromise can be costly. Many organisations are looking at advanced or specialty threat detection solutions, including sandboxing, to complement traditional defences and speed identification and response.
To help Fortinet customers meet this challenge, Fortinet has announced the new FortiSandbox-1000D. Its unique dual-level sandbox along with proactive pre-filtering, dynamic threat intelligence and rich reporting are effective in detecting highly targeted attacks.
And its consolidated approach to covering all protocols and functions in one appliance together with its ability to deploy stand-alone or as an integrated extension of FortiGate and FortiMail appliances, reduce cost and complexity.
Finally, the new FortiSandbox-1000D (and previously released FortiSandbox-3000D) now run software version 1.2, which features enhanced instrumentation to better deal with increasing virtual machine (VM) evasion techniques, an updated assessment engine to increase detection rates and new call-back detection to identify outbound communications both in the sandbox and on the wire.
