Security > FirewallsEssentials

A prominent Sydney club has deployed a network firewall solution to protect its gaming rewards system, which can potentially hold $50 million.

Palo Alto Networks is announcing at Interop Las Vegas a new version of its next-generation firewall that makes it possible to create tighter security policies based on information about specific applications.

The Barracuda Spam Firewall blocked more spam before filtering than any other appliance, using IP address reputation. As a result, spam as a percentage of total messages received was the lowest in the test. However, Barracuda also had the lowest percentage of spam caught, 88 per cent, which is acceptable but not great. Lower accuracy sometimes helps reduce the number of false positives, but it didn't seem to help the Barracuda much: one critical false positive and 33 bulk false positives rank sixth and fifth, respectively, among the nine solutions tested. Nevertheless, in terms of overall filtering performance, the Barracuda is definitely usable, especially after bulk senders are whitelisted.

Following a review of its infrastructure, the Sydney Church of England Grammar School (Shore) is replacing a mix of point solutions with two unified threat management network security appliances.