Trend Micro Takes Aim At Network Viruses

"This device certainly has people's interests," said Bill O'Brien, president of Commercium Technology, a Rumson, N.J., solution provider on a waiting list for the product. "It's addressing a new set of vulnerabilities in a completely new and different way."

Indeed, the product marks a significant departure from protecting networks at the application layer. Instead of focusing solely on traditional e-mail and file-based threats, Network VirusWall 1200 fights a new kind of offender: network viruses that infiltrate a corporate firewall and wreak havoc from inside the network.

The approach is so revolutionary, in fact, that Trend Micro executives have billed it as an "outbreak-prevention appliance," the first tool with a marketing slogan so broad.

Bob Hansmann, Trend Micro's senior product marketing manager for Network VirusWall 1200, said the product, which is in short supply right now, will be available in high volume in the next several months. He said the device marks a new era of security tools for Trend Micro, Cupertino, Calif.

"Now resellers have an answer when their customers get infected and say, 'I had a firewall and [intrusion detection and prevention]. Why wasn't I safe?' " Hansmann said. "This tool puts all the pieces in one box to solve a problem that customers want solved."

In particular, Hansmann said that the Network VirusWall 1200 device combines features such as vulnerability isolation; network outbreak monitoring and prevention; network scanning and detection; automated damage cleanup; and security policy enforcement.

Of these, the vulnerability isolation feature resonated loudest with solution providers in the security space. Pradeep Aswani, president of VPN Dynamics, Santa Clara, Calif., said this feature enables companies to break the network into segments and respond to outbreaks before they afflict the entire network.

"One of the biggest problems with enterprises is that they don't know where the viruses are propagating from," he said. "Segmentation and isolation makes it easy for administrators to quarantine a particular area and make sure the users there are clean."

The Network VirusWall 1200 hardware is $5,995 per unit for up to five units. The VirusWall 1200 software costs $30 per seat for the first 250 seats.