March 22, 2005 - (HOSTSEARCH.COM) – Network defense company Sourcefire, today announced that its IS3000 gigabit intrusion detection/prevention solution has been awarded the "NSS Approved" ranking from The NSS Group. The IS3000 underwent rigorous testing, and was the only one of the five vendors recently evaluated that attained certification at the gigabit level. The NSS Group is one of the world's foremost independent security testing facilities.
"The NSS testing provides technical validation to support all of the awards Sourcefire's technology is winning," said Martin Roesch, Founder and CTO of Sourcefire. "NSS's high praise for the Sourcefire's 3D System and its Gigabit capabilities sends the message that our solutions are not just innovative, but they also provide customers with the ability to significantly increase the security of their networks."
According to The NSS Group report, "the system performed consistently and reliably throughout the entire process." The NSS report states that the IS3000 is "a true 1Gbps device under all normal network conditions," turning in a flawless performance in all real world tests. It goes on to note that "Out of the box, the Sourcefire IS 3000 handled 1 million open connections easily, and the device appeared to be immune to stateless attack replay tools such as Stick and Snot."
"We were pleased to see that Sourcefire's Intrusion Sensor performed extremely well in our real-world testing," said Bob Walder, President of The NSS Group, "Specifically, we felt that the IS3000's detection and decoding of fragmented and obfuscated attacks delivers a level of performance to which we would like to see all other IDS and IPS products aspire."
The report also recognizes Sourcefire's RNA technology as a key strategic differentiator, stating: "The 'crown jewels' of Sourcefire 3D come in the shape of RNA which provides much needed context to intrusion alerts via the use of extensive passive scanning and vulnerability analysis. This allows the Defense Center to accurately determine the impact on a particular host of a particular vulnerability and set the Impact Flag accordingly. This should greatly enhance the analyst's ability to focus on exactly those alerts which pose the biggest security concerns on his network, and this should go a long way to removing one of the perceived problems of IDS Systems - analyst overload from too many irrelevant alerts. Throughout our testing, this feature worked impeccably, and is a very compelling reason on its own to purchase this product."
