As vendors pour into the internal security market, Check Point Software Technologies Inc., among the first entrants in this space, continues to refine its line of InterSpect appliances with a host of new features.

The company this week will release Version 2.0 of the appliances' software, which now includes features that enable the boxes to work with Check Point's established management consoles, Provider-1 and Management 1, and integrate with the company's Smart, or Security Management Architecture, technology.

Perhaps the biggest change in the new release is the integration with Check Point's Zone Labs Integrity offering. Integrity provides policy enforcement and endpoint security, including the ability to protect against spyware, worms and other client-side threats. The integration of the two products extends the policy-enforcement and reporting capabilities of Integrity to the network level.

The heart of InterSpect is Check Point's stateful inspection firewall technology, which is used to inspect all traffic traveling between network segments. Suspicious traffic, such as mass scanning attempts coming from a worm-infected PC, is dropped. The infected machine is then quarantined until it can be cleaned, patched and brought back onto the main network safely.

This quarantine strategy is one that several security and software vendors are pursuing right now. Cisco Systems Inc. and Microsoft Corp. both have efforts under way to build solutions capable of identifying and isolating infected or out-of-compliance PCs. Last week, the companies said they plan to cooperate on this strategy and share information on their respective solutions.

Check Point CEO Gil Shwed discusses the company's future with eWEEK's Dennis Fisher. Click here to read more.

To this set of capabilities, Check Point has added the ability to protect against threats coming in via e-mail as well. Version 2.0 of the InterSpect software supports POP3 (Post Office Protocol 3), SMTP and IMAP, three of the more widely used mail transfer protocols. All these additions to the products are the result of customer suggestions, company officials said.

"We've gotten a lot of feedback from our customers on things they'd like to see, and we've worked hard to put in the things that make sense," said Tamir Hardos, product manager at Check Point, based in Redwood City, Calif.

As part of the launch of the new version, Check Point is introducing a new low-end InterSpect appliance, the 210N.

Features in InterSpect 2.0

Integration with Integrity

Check out eWEEK.com's Security Center for the latest security news, reviews and analysis.

Be sure to add our eWEEK.com security news feed to your RSS newsreader or My Yahoo page

Discuss Check Point Refines InterSpect   >>> Be the FIRST to comment on this article!

>>> More Channel News and Analysis Articles          >>> More By Dennis Fisher