Fortinet Upgrades Antivirus Firmware

FortiOS 2.5 for FortiGate Antivirus firewalls adds intrusion prevention and other enhancements to FortiGate's firewall, VPN, antivirus, intrusion detection and content-filtering capabilities without the need for hardware upgrades. The announcement comes on the heels of recent intrusion-prevention product releases from Cisco and Symantec, and Microsoft bolstered its own move into the sector this month with the purchase of Romanian antivirus software developer GeCad.

The growing breadth and variety of viral attacks makes intrusion detection and prevention more crucial than ever.

"The nature of today's attacks is largely indiscriminate; viruses aren't specific to vertical industries," says Fortinet vice president of marketing Richard Kagan. "Intrusion detection has been part of our product line since the beginning, but it's a smoke alarm, not a fire extinguisher, so now we've added prevention."

Michael Rasmussen, an analyst with Forrester Research, released a report this week stating that while intrusion-detection systems are being fortified with intrusion-prevention and other firewall technologies, it's an evolutionary step and doesn't mean that intrusion-detection systems should be scrapped, as some have argued.

He writes that the lack of skilled security systems management personnel has exacerbated the problem. "We are only now seeing the maturity in the security workforce that truly understands this technology and can appropriately tune, configure, manage and monitor these systems," Rasmussen writes. "Ask the victims of Code Red, Nimda, Slammer and many others how effective their firewalls were in most cases. Technology helps protect organizations, but they all require management and layers of defenses."

Kagan says customer dissatisfaction with intrusion-detection systems has stemmed largely from unreal anticipation of what the technology could do, but that they still need the information intrusion-detection tools provide.

"A lot of it has to do with inappropriately set expectations," he says. "Intrusion detection often was sold to customers as a way to stop bad things from happening, and when you set the expectations wrong, you're guaranteed to get customers mad at you. Adding intrusion prevention helps, but you still need detection to help analyze your systems during and after an incident, and most people would never part with that data."

In addition to intrusion prevention, FortiOS 2.5's enhancements include enhanced VLAN and zone support for up to eight clustered FortiGate units; antivirus screening for file transfers and virus sample quarantine; the quarantine of infected or suspicious files; and e-mail filtering and tagging.

Fortinet sells FortiOS 2.5 through its distributors and VARs, which now number about 100 in North America. It's distributed free to existing customers with standard maintenance and support contracts.