Secure firewall to help cos block IP addresses

Now organisation will be able to create policies that block connections by an Internet protocol (IP) address based on country code information with the launch of Secure Computing Corporation’s Firewall Geo-Location service on Thursday.

The Secure Firewall, formerly known as Sidewinder, is the first and only firewall to provide organisations with the ability to reduce their exposure to attack by essentially shrinking the size of the Internet.

Geo-Location does this by blocking or allowing the organisation 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.

Geo-Location, in conjunction with Secure Computing’s TrustedSource reputation-based filtering, further reduces an organisation’s threat exposure by defining policies that rely on a combination of IP address reputation as well as country code.

Besides preventing employees from visiting malware infected websites hosted in countries, the Secure Firewall and Geo-Location policy reduces traffic volume and therefore bandwidth requirements on public-facing web, application and remote access servers, which do not have to process these unwanted connections from countries which the organisation has disallowed.

The firewall is setting a new standard for proactive threat detection by integrating TrustedSource and the new Geo-Location technology into every firewall. The combination 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,” Network Computing Architects Chief Security Officer Preston Hogue said.

IDC Research Director Charles Kolodgy said that Geo-Location technology potentially provides benefits by allowing enterprises to filter connections at the firewall perimeter based on the country location.