Sourcefire Launches 3D Product Suite - Delivering Real-Time Network Defense against Malicious Attacks; Company Announces New 'Smart' Intrusion Detection/Prevention Technology

Business Wire, June 14, 2004

Business Editors/High-Tech Writers

COLUMBIA, Md.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--June 14, 2004

Sourcefire, Inc., a world leader in real-time network defense, today announced its new 3D Product Suite, which unifies intrusion detection and vulnerability management technologies to provide organizations with the most precise and effective network security possible. As part of the 3D suite, the company is also announcing its entry into the IPS market with its Intrusion Sensor 4.0, delivering best-of-breed inline prevention, as well as passive detection. Sourcefire 3D is the first integrated security solution to allow customers to mount a real-time network defense to address the security issues caused by rapidly evolving threats and dissolving network perimeters.

Sourcefire's 3D(TM) product suite includes Sourcefire Intrusion Sensors(TM) and Agents, Sourcefire RNA Sensors(TM) and the Sourcefire Defense Center(TM). This comprehensive product suite enables organizations to more confidently and effectively secure their networks in real-time through an integrated process of discovering risks, vulnerabilities and threats, determining the impact to their business and taking the appropriate action to defend their network. The Sourcefire Defense Center enables users to automatically leverage the ABC's of Defense - Alert, Block, Correct - against all network threats. The Sourcefire Defense Center also enables users to enforce their security policies in addition to providing a centralized point of administration, analysis and reporting for the entire 3D Suite.

"Sourcefire continues to impress our organization with its attention to solving real-world needs, and this IPS initiative is a great example of how the company is solving issues that other vendors haven't even considered," said Kirk Drake, CIO at National Institute of Health's Federal Credit Union. "By correlating detection with real-time network data, Sourcefire is allowing customers to implement a highly effective and precise prevention solution."

Next-Generation Intrusion Detection/Prevention

Current IPS solutions are generally limited to blocking and quarantining only a small subset of known attacks because they lack any knowledge of the systems they are implemented to protect. Sourcefire is solving this problem by integrating RNA's real-time network context with the threat data from Sourcefire Intrusion Sensors, to offer the industry's most precise intrusion prevention and detection solution. This increased network context reduces the risk associated with false positives and potential denial of service conditions by allowing users to set their IPS to block precise threats to specific systems.

In addition, the Sourcefire Defense Center combines the accuracy of the award-winning Snort-based Intrusion Sensors with the persistent, real-time network intelligence provided by RNA Sensors. This allows users to set and enforce policies based on the correlation of a detected threat with network vulnerability and asset data. In addition, this context enables Intrusion Sensors to be tuned so they apply only relevant policies to individual threats.

With this release, Sourcefire Intrusion Sensors will support the most robust set of drop/replace rules on the market. Leveraging the flexibility of the Snort rules language, Sourcefire Intrusion Sensors benefit from a combination of signature, protocol, and anomaly-based inspection methods to achieve the most accurate detection capability available. With this accuracy, users can now confidently prevent known attacks and malicious threats. This release expands the rules language beyond basic alerting to allow any Snort rule to be configured to either drop the malicious packet or replace the malicious content with benign content. This provides users with the ability to prevent the largest number of threats while defending their network.

"Sourcefire is the first vendor to deliver Intrusion Prevention technology that allows users to block with confidence. If you can't detect it, you can't block it. Sourcefire simply has the best detection capabilities in the market with the integration of RNA," said Martin Roesch, Founder and CTO of Sourcefire and creator of Snort. "When we introduced RNA last year, Sourcefire cemented our lead as the best detection technology in the world. Now, with our new, smart IPS solution, we expect to be the leader for the best overall prevention technology."

Sourcefire RNA 2.0

In addition to its intrusion prevention technology, Sourcefire is enhancing its 3D Product Suite with the latest version of its breakthrough passive discovery technology, Sourcefire RNA. Sourcefire RNA Sensors enable organizations to more confidently protect their networks through a unique patent pending combination of passive network discovery, behavioral profiling, and integrated vulnerability analysis to deliver the benefits of real-time network profiling and change management without the drawbacks of traditional approaches to identifying network assets and vulnerabilities. This layer of intelligence greatly reduces the costs associated with managing and responding to network threats. With Sourcefire RNA, organizations are able to protect their information assets and manage all of their network solutions more efficiently, especially security.