Jan 23, 2009

First 10Gbps IPS certification: McAfee M-8000 receives NSS Labs Approved

10Gbps:
NSS Labs just released the first 10Gbps IPS certification as part of our 10Gbps IPS group test. A number of vendors are offering 10Gbps appliances: Juniper, McAfee, Enterasys, Force10, Sourcefire. McAfee's M-8000 was the first to pass our extensive testing and receive certification. In addition to meeting the rigorous performance requirements, the product scored exceptionally well on the security effectiveness testing. Read the full report here.

Still other vendors are taking the solution approach by including a load balancer and multiple IPS devices. It should be noted, these could use any reasonable switching approach to stack/VLAN multiple physical IPS devices into one logical unit. Think of products from the likes of: IBM, Cisco, Crossbeam (Chassis/Blade), Sourcefire, TippingPoint, TopLayer, etc. Depending on what a company already has installed, and what their growth/infrstructure plans look like, this model could also work well. It will come down to a TCO and effectiveness decision.

It should be noted that this was an award that was a long time in the making since we announced the testing in the summer of 2008; and many vendors had announced products well before that. Indeed there are many reasons why it takes so long. #1 - It's hard to get right. It is not necessarily easy for a vendor that has a 'successful' 1Gbps IPS to deliver the same quality product that truly meets 10Gbps requirements. We just held a technical webinar on the topic of 10Gbps IPS. We covered the challenges that vendors face when making a 10 Gbps IPS, as well as those faced by buyers who are evaluating these products. The webinar is recorded and available here. I was pleasantly surprised to receive several comments that this was the "best webinar ever," and very informative. If you don't have time to listen to the webinar, you can probably at least peruse the slides.

As we've seen in our testing, there are plenty of gotchas to look out for. And for this large and complex of a purchase, most of the potential buyers do NOT have the capabilities to adequately evaluate and test such a product. In such cases it should really behoove the vendors who have done a good job to have their products validated by a competent 3rd party. So be sure to ask your vendor what kind of testing and certification the product has gone through. (OK, somewhat of a trick question: I must confess I don't know of any other lab capable of doing the level of testing that we do, either in terms of throughput or security ;-)

/rick

Jan 20, 2009

The value of "reviews" just went down another notch



Belkin is today's unfortunate poster child of dishonest marketing, the euphemistic "putting lipstick on a pig".

When I began my career in IT, a while ago, I relied on user reviews to provide me with some guidance. Which products were better than others, more reliable, faster, etc. The world of user-based reviews has slid a long way. Apparently a sales rep at Belkin had been hiring people on the internet to flag negative reviews of his products as "unhelpful" and post positive ones. There are plenty of other journalists and bloggers lambasting the guy, and the company president for denying and then brushing over the transgression. Amazingly, the employee still has his job. PC World covers the pandemic further here.

Folks: This is why a trusted independent 3rd party is so important when it comes to getting good advice about products. The financial motivations for individuals with a sales quota and a boss to please, or companies with investors to show returns for can be tempted to cross the line. "users" can be anyone, write anything, and have almost absolute anonymity, and no accountability. Reviews can be written in such a way that they are generic enough to apply to any product, allowing them to spam such services that host reviews. This "review SPAM" (can we coin RSPAM now?) can appear on any magazine site, or portal, regardless of how trusted the mother brand may be.

To reach back to a 1990's cartoon that has new meaning here, on the internet, you just don't know which reviews are dogs.

Jan 7, 2009

Webinar: 10Gbps Intrusion Prevention

Are 10Gbps network IPS products mature enough for deployment? Depends... Join our upcoming webcast to find out why 10Gbps IPS is more than 10 times more difficult to get right than 1Gbps IPS. NSS Labs' Vik Phatak will also walk through a checklist of criteria to look for when evaluating products. We'll also give a behind the scenes look at how we implement our industry standard IPS test methodology using products like BreakingPoint.

You can also look forward to some real experiences culled from our 10Gbps IPS group test. The first results forthcoming end of January 09 and the full report end of Q1.