Texas-based TippingPoint Technologies says its entry into SA through SecureData offers customers a network-based intrusion prevention system, as well as traffic shaping and security infrastructure patching before exploits are discovered.
The US company says it was attracted to SecureData because of its record of introducing new technology in SA and gaining market share in double-digits.
TippingPoint`s UnityOne-1200 unit offers blocking, like intrusion detection systems, but also monitors, reports and takes action to intrusions on the network.
Rob Krol, sales director of TippingPoint, says whereas IDS systems are deployed on the network perimeter, the UnityOne does packet inspection at a high speed on layers one through seven of the network.
"Most systems investigate on layer four (port 80), but our unit inspects from infrastructure layer to application layer, which means no matter where it is deployed on the network, the network is secured."
Having come from an ATM switching background, TippingPoint says its "high horsepower" system can perform deep packet inspection of millions of simultaneous connections, as opposed to Intel-based machines that inspect packets one by one.
Virtual patching
TippingPoint also offers three applications that assist with the patching and network abuse problems encountered by organisations. The first, "virtual patching" technology, does not wait for vulnerabilities to be exploited before patches are deployed, says Krol. TippingPoint`s customers receive digital vaccine patches as soon as the company writes them.
On 16 July last year, Microsoft`s DCOM RPC hole was discovered. TippingPoint wrote a patch by 27 July and patched customers immediately, so that "they were patched by the time of the first exploits, which was 15 August", says Krol.
The second, infrastructure patching, is aimed at prevention of distributed denial-of-service attacks on hosts and security gear like firewalls and routers.
Lastly, application acceleration and protection consists of shaping down the bandwidth, the "pipe" through which application sessions are streamed. The system identifies traffic types, reports on them and temporarily shapes down a specific protocol`s transmission rate if it appears to have no business on the network, such as peer-to-peer file-sharing packets. This is bi-directional, meaning one may be able to download but not upload, to prevent network abuse.
"Everywhere you look, companies` pipes are filled with rubbish," says Krol. "In certain cases we can give them 30% of their bandwidth back."
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