The Barrier1 Difference

Network Security: Today’s Realities

Threats, attacks and unwanted intrusions have grown dramatically in sophistication. Individual, stand-alone security technologies such as firewalls, antivirus and UTM appliances, were not designed to address the complex offense of today’s professional hackers, attackers and cyber criminals.

Today, network administrators and IT professionals face a new generation of complex threats — malware, botnets, web services attacks, rootkits, zero day attacks, denial of service and blended threats are only sampling of the security threats facing organizations. In Wall Street & Technology, David Tan reported:

“Blended threats use multiple methods and techniques to propagate or attack, often combining attributes from hacking, computer-worm and denial-of-service attacks to exploit known vulnerabilities. Today’s blended threats represent the greatest risk to information security since the launch of computer viruses more than 20 years ago.”

The Outdated UTM “Solution”

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The trend in network security for the management and defense of attacks has moved away from the deployment of individual solutions toward a consolidation of multiple applications into one appliance. The various individual point solutions are glued together and marketed as a Unified Threat Management (UTM) appliance, and is intended to offer a layered, turnkey security approach. The standard UTM now includes perimeter-focused products such as a firewall, intrusion detection systems (IDS), antivirus (AV), antispam (AS), content filtering (CF), and recently anti-adware and anti-spyware (AW/SW). The analysis is serial-based (linear) and slow.

While this approach centralizes the individual point solution into a single management console, these UTM appliances do not coordinate the communication between the individual technologies. Each security product is still running independently without a common event database. This requires human interaction between the compartmentalized solutions to monitor, interpret and coordinate security administration — resulting in a reaction time that is simply too slow to stop constantly mutating viruses.

Today’s threats employ multiple vectors and technologies in the attack. The standard UTM was not designed to address such complexity because they feature basic list-based technologies which only address known threats. They are not effective against blended threats, zero day events and bots.

Barrier1: Intelligent Threat Management

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A new generation of sophisticated, multidimensional analysis with instantaneous reaction and defensive capabilities is needed — a comprehensive network security solution that is able to analyze the entire network, recognize known and even unknown threats, and react to those threats instantaneously. Intelligent Threat Management and Barrier1 is the breakthrough product that brings together all of these answers into one appliance.

The Barrier1 appliance resides at the customer site and monitors, analyzes and defends with multiple onboard security technologies, including firewall / application firewall, IDS / IDP, antivirus, antispam, web content filtering, SSL VPN and more. In addition, Barrier1 also analyzes critical information gathered at various points in the network, including data from third-party routers and switches.

Barrier1 virtualizes network security. The product can monitor 736 different log formats so virtually any intrusion, attack or theft (IAT) attempting to compromise the network is detected and stopped. The IAT can be external, internal or both. It can be spam, web content, or a virus; it could be a true attempt to break in and steal confidential data from the organization or just an infected laptop plugged into the network. Barrier1’s patent-pending AARE software holistically and intelligently gathers, correlates, analyzes, interprets and stops all IATs.

How Is This Done?

• Intelligence: AARE utilizes 20 proactive analysis mechanisms. These proactive analysis and probability tools are also supported by reactive, list-based tools which are effective against known threats. This means Barrier1 delivers the best of both worlds.
• Automation: Barrier1 works like a fully manned security operation center, only it reacts in microseconds, not hours or days. By creating a feedback loop, Barrier1 gathers critical information from multiple sources inside and outside the network, analyzes that information, and then detects, reports and blocks dangerous known and anomalous behavior instantaneously.
• Speed: Processing speed is achieved through the selective analysis of critical data in conjunction with sophisticated parallel processing. The end result is only 12.7 microseconds of latency with throughput of 100 megabytes per second.

Barrier1 Intelligent Threat Management appliances take network security to a previously unseen level of depth and breadth from both inside and outside the network. With Barrier1, your network is safe from both known and unknown threats. With Barrier1, network security is under control.