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…and a part of Stonesoft is travelling with them. Who? But Ascensio naturally!

They arrived in Nepal and slowly (but inexorably) started their trip to Base Camp, blogging from Internet Cafè on the way.

Read about their first day towards Mt Everest!

written by RoarinPenguin - 506 views \\ tags: ascensio, everest, start

Stonesoft is pleased to report that the StoneGate IPS outperformed several industry leading solutions, including solutions from Tipping Point, Juniper and Cisco, in the recent NSS Labs IPS test. The testing represented the industry’s most rigorous test of leading IPS solutions to date, including 1,159 validated exploits. The tests specifically focused on security effectiveness, performance and TCO.

Here are some quick highlights on StoneGate IPS results:

• Ranked in the top 3 for providing high levels of protection by default policy alone from 2004-2009
• At the 10-Gig level, the StoneGate IPS-6105 ranked #1 for 3-year TCO per Mbps
• At the multi-Gig level, the StoneGate IPS-6105 ranked #2 for TCO at only $60 per Mbps
• At the sub-Gig level, the StoneGate IPS-1060 ranked #1 for TCO at only $82 per Mbps

NSS Labs also gave us high marks for ease of manageability: "Stonesoft’s Management Center builds on its firewall management and is extremely intuitive and easy to use. Deploying Stonesoft’s pre-defined policies is simple and efficient. It took almost no time to setup, configure and tune."

The results clearly point out that organizations should re-evaluate what IPS products are leading the market. The very same companies that are perceived as market leaders are not delivering the performance and TCO that today’s companies need. It’s time to consider Stonesoft!

For more information about the NSS Labs IPS test, please visit www.nsslabs.com.

written by StoneUS - 574 views

Definitely a different post but I always thought that StoneBlog should share also background cultural info beside hints and tips about StoneGate… and given the particular season, well, here we go.

You all know Stonesoft is a Finnish company… and you might know that in Finland there is a very special person living in a very special place.

The name of this VIP in Finnish is JouluPukki, known worldwide as Mr.Santa Claus.

He can be met in a small village close to the city of Rovaniemi, the administrative capital of Finland’s northernmost province LapLand.

This village is right inside the northern Arctic Circle, and it is considered worldwide the official place where Santa Claus comes from. Despite the small size, as you can imagine the village has a very active Post Office. Latest counters report more than 8 million items received in the last years from 184 different countries… from people writing to Santa Claus’ Main Post Office, Santa’s Workshop Village, 96930 Arctic Circle.

There are many people not believing in Santa Claus anymore… but I do and I have visited him personally last summer in his office. I can tell you that regardless what you believe to be the real truth, it really has been a great emotion to meet this giant man and see the very beautiful Lapland (which I have been told has a different way of being splendid depending on the season you visit).

But continuing with the tradition, Santa Claus home and secret workshop is believed to be in a hidden place in Lapland: a mountain (not very high one, 486 mt/1594 ft) called Korvatunturi, a name that translates into "Ear Fell". It is indeed through this Ear Fell that Santa is able to hear all the children worldwide and built the famous "naughty and nice list".

Another curiosity: many cultures believe that Santa Claus is coming down the chimney, while in Finland he uses to knock on the front door on Christmas Eve celebration and ask the famous question:
"Onkos täällä kilttejä lapsia?" (Are there (any) well-behaved children here?)

And for those of you who still do not believe he’s real, well… let’s use some technology to give you the real proof: from december to january you can connect to www.santaclauslive.com where you can see live Santa in his office (during the office hours) and you can also see the beautiful village dressed for Christmas through an external webcam (yes, even from your iPhone)

And finally, if you want to track the sleigh during Christmas Eve, you can check NORAD website who will track Santa Sleigh on the 24th december using Google Earth!

This all said, I wish you all a Merry Christmas (Hyvää Joulua) and a Happy New Year (Onnellista Uutta Vuotta).

StoneBlog Admin

written by RoarinPenguin - 519 views \\ tags: christmas, Joulua, JouluPukki, Santa Claus, Season Wishes

Léonard Dahan, our beloved country manager for France and Benelux, shares here his views about Stonesoft´s products and strategy, key differentiators and partnership offer, market´s evolution and customers´ expectations.
The video is about 15 minutes long and sorry, it is french only.

written by Alexandre Dumur - 570 views

Recently Stonesoft added a new feature to our SMC to allow you to “Search Rules”.   This feature allows to you search your rulebase based on any of the fields listed below.
✓    Source
✓    Destination
✓    Service
✓    Action
✓    Users
✓    QoS Class
✓    Time
✓    Comment
✓    Tag
✓    Source VPN
✓    Hits

So, with these fields to choose from you can use either one or many to help find a given rule in your rulebase.  This can be a very useful tool to help control your growing rulebase with all the change request you get.  I will provide two quick example’s of how to find the rules.   One is simply matching the elements in the rulebase and the other is matching alias elements.  Matching alias elements only takes one more step since they can have different values per firewall engines.

Continue reading »

written by SideKick - 618 views

How many times have you been asked to setup a VPN tunnel between your StoneGate firewalls and another 3rd party VPN endpoint that is sitting behind a NAT?   What’s the trick to getting this to work?  It’s very simple….. ‘Locations’….

Continue reading »

written by SideKick - 1,589 views

How many of you want to connect to your work using your Mac OS X desktops and laptops?  Well, there is some good news for you.   We have tested this using VPN Tracker 5.4.1 and successfully connected to StoneGate Firewall versions 4.2.8, 4.3.2 and 5.0.1 without issue.

It even gets a Virtual IP address via MODE CFG like the StoneGate Windows Client.  Still with Certificate authentication though (XAUTH works also, but not alone.  It still requires a cert in any case.)

NOTE — Don’t use static Username/Password (e.g. don’t set anything for username/password fields via Edit or you won’t be prompted for a username / password)

So, let’s break this into 3 sections,  The Mac OS X Steps, VPN Tracker Steps, & StoneGate Settings.

Continue reading »

written by SideKick - 1,930 views

Dear StoneBlog community,

from now on, we will reward select StoneBlog authors with a “I FW 127.0.0.1“  or “I eat hackers for breakfast” T-shirt, and maybe with an occasional mousepad.  The criteria for these rewards if totally subjective – basically, whenever we read something nice, beautiful, funny, witty, something that makes us smile and/or makes our day, the T-shirt (or something else) is on its way. “Us” refers primarily to Stonesoft marketing department, but can, and hopefully will, be extended to include just about anyone.

So, whenever you think a StoneBlog post earns a T-shirt (or something else), please drop a line with a link to heli.harri(AT)stonesoft.com  and tell us why. Happy StoneBlogging!

—-
PS. The first T-shirt goes to Ray Maurer for his utterly sincere, positive and enthusiastic real-life, real-world customer experience with StoneGate. This not only made our day, it made our whole week . Thanks, Ray!

written by helih - 1,403 views \\ tags: 127.0.0.1, firewall, hackers, StoneBlog Community

One of our new customers was eager to switch all of their competitor’s firewalls in their network to StoneGate firewalls. I arrived onsite midday the day before the scheduled cutover and was planning to go through the normal routine of interviewing the staff and so I could make sure to avoid any pitfalls and make sure the cutover was as smooth as possible. However, the customer had other plans for me. After two days of rebooting the  firewalls four to five times a day, they asked if I could have the StoneGate firewalls ready by 7:30 pm that night. Keep in mind I didn’t arrive until 1 pm. Well long story short I said “sure no problem” with a muted smile. I got the firewalls configured and was ready to make the swap when the customer suggested taking a quick break for dinner before we made the cut. When we came back we found the  firewalls down again and thought we might as well leave them down. We powered on the new StoneGate cluster, made initial contact, pushed the policies and had life breathing back into the network. The StoneGate solution made us look like champs. Thank you Stonesoft! We would not have been able to do this with any other system as fast and as easy. The StoneGate Management Center interface is like none other and far exceeds ASDM and other similar interfaces. You gave me the power and the training to hit this curveball out of the park!

written by RayMaurer - 994 views \\ tags: Cutover, firewall, Partner, story

Up until recently, DoS attacks, Syn-Flood and other security issues were items that those in the business world thought were made up phrases or part of some terrible attempt of a Haiku.

But now, what do sites like CNN, eBay, Amazon, Yahoo and most recently Twitter all have in common? They’ve all been on the cover of main-stream media – and not for the right reasons. In fact, they were all the target of successful DoS attacks.

It was interesting to see that one of the main business media outlets published an entire report of DoS and other security related issues. When the demographics are CEO, investors, CFO it’s  great example to show how the drive of integration security into business is drawing closer to closer and ever more important. Here is the link to the video from CNBC.com

http://www.cnbc.com/id/15840232?video=1219614333&play=1

Interestingly, StoneGate provides a variety of solutions to help protect from these types of attacks, and even most recently by integrating DoS protection into our FW/VPN appliances. There was also a recent case where an international client was the target of a DoS, which impacted them for several days. Around the same time, we released our new code, which they downloaded and as soon as they pushed the new version out, it immediately stopped the attacks – as easy as that.

written by wpoveromo - 671 views