Fortinet® – the pioneer and leading provider of unified threat management (UTM) solutions – today announced the Australian and New Zealand availability of the first in a family of security appliances designed to “harden” databases by detecting weaknesses in passwords, access privileges and configuration settings.

The FortiDB-1000B appliance provides an automated, cost-effective and centralised solution for database application security, with inbuilt evaluation and remediation advice for common compliance requirements. By identifying weaknesses in databases, the FortiDB appliance helps to prevent the theft of proprietary and personal data. FortiDB works by identifying the weakness, alerting system administrators of potential threats, and offering remediation advice.

Charles Cote, Fortinet regional director for Australia and New Zealand commented, “Stealing personal data can be hugely profitable for cybercriminals, and corporate databases have now become tempting targets due to the sensitive and valuable information they hold. Businesses in Australia and New Zealand need to improve their ability to detect and guard against data breaches. This is especially critical for industries such as health, financial services, and retail - all of which have strong regulatory and compliance requirements surrounding protecting and securing data. The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS) in particular, is a key concern for businesses that process customer credit card information.”

Charles Kolodgy, IDC research director commented, “Much of the world’s personal and proprietary electronic data is held in the databases of corporations and businesses, with most of it having an intrinsic monetary value in the criminal underworld. So, database security tools, like Fortinet’s FortiDB-1000B appliance, are no longer optional. Instead, they are a necessary component to help protect personal information that organisations are obligated to secure.” The FortiDB-1000B appliance supports up to 30 concurrent database instances, and works with Oracle, DB2, Sybase and SQL Server databases. The solution provides automated security assessments, which significantly reduces a database administrators’ (DBA) workload, by eliminating the need to manually search for weaknesses. Automating database security has the added benefit of limiting exposures when DBAs are on leave, or terminate employment. This new appliance is an optimised, security-hardened device that easily plugs into the network for simplified installation, deployment and management of the product.

Pricing and Availability:

The FortiDB-1000B appliance is available immediately, starting from an Australian list price of $24,995 ex GST, and a New Zealand list price of $30,995 ex GST.

Fortinet products are distributed in Australia by Lan 1, Distribution Central, and Whitegold Solutions. Fortinet products are distributed in New Zealand by Ingram Micro and Distribution Central.

For more information on Fortinet’s FortiDB-1000B visit: http://www.fortinet.com/products/fortinet_database.html.

About Fortinet (www.fortinet.com) :

Fortinet is the pioneer and leading provider of ASIC-accelerated unified threat management, or UTM, security systems, which are used by enterprises and service providers to increase their security while reducing total operating costs. Fortinet solutions were built from the ground up to integrate multiple levels of security protection--including firewall, antivirus, intrusion prevention, VPN, spyware prevention and anti-spam -- designed to help customers protect against network and content level threats. Leveraging a custom ASIC and unified interface, Fortinet solutions offer advanced security functionality that scales from remote office to chassis-based solutions with integrated management and reporting. Fortinet solutions have won multiple awards around the world and are the only security products that are certified in six programs by ICSA Labs: Firewall, Antivirus, IPSec VPN, SSL VPN, Network IPS, and Anti-spam. Fortinet is privately held and based in Sunnyvale, California. #### Copyright © 2008 Fortinet, Inc. All rights reserved. The symbols ® and ™ denote respectively federally registered trademarks and unregistered trademarks of Fortinet, Inc., its subsidiaries and affiliates, including, but not limited to, the following trademarks: Fortinet, FortiGate, FortiGuard, FortiManager, FortiMail, FortiClient, FortiCare, FortiAnalyzer, FortiReporter, FortiOS, FortiASIC, FortiWiFi, FortiSwitch, FortiVoIP, FortiBIOS, FortiLog, FortiResponse, FortiDB, APSecure, and ABACAS. Other trademarks belong to their respective owners.

Media Contact: Sebastian Rice, 02 9959 1991, seb@silverspan.com